BBC Learning English | Pronunciation Tips

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Pronunciation tips

About the sounds
Videos
Similar sounds exercises:
Unit 1
Unit 2
Unit 3
Unit 4
Unit 5

The sounds of English

When writing English we use the 26 letters of the alphabet.

Spoken English has more than 26 sounds though. There are roughly 44 different sounds. therefore it's not very easy only to use the letters of the alphabet to show the pronunciation of English.

There is a system which uses a group of symbols. Some of these symbols look the same as letters and some are very different.

You can use these symbols to write out the pronunciation of words and in many dictionaries for English learners you will see the pronunciation written out.

To show that what is written are sounds and not letters the transcriptions are written between slashes, / /.

For example, the pronunciation of the word 'pet' is written: /pet/.

In this example the sound symbols look exactly the same as the letters. You can only tell we are talking about pronunciation rather than spelling because of the / /.

However, some words look very different when you see their pronunciation.

is the word 'church'.

This is why it is very useful to learn the symbols. You can't usually match the letters in a word to the sounds of the word. Also, because most dictionaries for English learners use these symbols you can work out the pronunciation of any word in the dictionary without a teacher!

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Download Sounds of English video (24.8 MB mp4)

Learning the sounds

These are the symbols for the sounds of English. Clicking on a symbol will take you to another page where you can watch a video about that particular sound.

The sounds are organised into the following different groups:

Short vowels

Long vowels

Diphthongs (double vowel sounds)

Voiceless consonants

Voiced consonants

Other consonants

Download this chart (144 K)

To listen to the sounds of English you can also try our audio chart. The chart will open in a pop-up window.

Listen to the sounds of English

Please note:
To watch the videos in the page you will need the free Flash Player software for your computer. You can get Flash here.*

*The BBC is not responsible for the content of external websites.

About the videos

The videos in the Pronunciation Tips section of this site are presented by Alex Bellem.

Alex has an undergraduate degree in Arabic and Turkish. She followed this with an MA in (Theoretical) Linguistics at University College London (UCL) and a PhD in Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) where she focused on Arabic phonology and phonetics.

She's also a CELTA-qualified English language teacher and spent a few years teaching English as a Foreign Language. At the time these videos were made in early 2008 Alex was lecturing part-time in the Linguistics Department at SOAS and was working as a Pronunciation Linguist in the BBC's Pronunciation Unit.

The videos were shot by J-P Newman and many thanks to Matt Cleghorn for his enormous contribution to their editing.

Thanks also to Professor J C Wells for his insights.

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