How to Tune Your Vowels

You create speech sound when you expel air through your mouth, nose or both.

This sound vibrates in the listener’s ear drums, then is processed as speech in the brain. But you didn’t need me to tell you that to figure it out.

• Vowel Sounds occurs when you expel air through your vocal tract unobstructed.
• Consonant Sounds occurs when you block or constrict the vocal tract at some point.  

For instance, /m/ is a consonant and /a/ is a vowel. Go ahead, try saying them out loud and see if you can tell the difference.

Sounds and Scripts

Before we move on, we need to distinguish between the concepts of vowel sound and vowel script.

A sound is basically just that – something you can hear. A script is what represents that sound on paper – also known as letters.

The English language allows for A LOT of vowel sounds. But the English writing system only has 5 vowel scripts – A…E…I…O….U (and sometimes Y!)

Because there aren’t enough vowel scripts to assign to all the possible vowel sounds, people had to get creative. That’s why English words have weird spellings.

Take the ‘g’ in the word “thought”, for example – it’s not pronounced “thoggit”, so why is it there?

And why is it that the vowel sound completely changes once you remove the ‘t’ at the end to create the word “though”?

Anyway, the point that I’m making from earlier is that you can never trust written language. 

As I’ve said before, you need to train your ability to conceptualize language as sound. The best way to do this is to connect speech sounds to the physical movements that produce them.

To first make sense of what is going on, you will need to have a quick lesson in speech anatomy.  

Vowels have three physical features that distinguish one vowel sound from the next:

• Tongue position
• Roundedness
• Nasality

You can explore the second two features on your own by researching them on Wikipedia. In this lesson, we’ll focus just on the most important element – Tongue Position.