Wells, A study of the formants of the pure vowels of British English

Phonetic symbols

The phonetic and phonemic symbols used are those of the International Phonetic Association [19].

[To see them correctly you need a Unicode-compliant browser set to a Unicode character set that includes IPA. Otherwise, go to the SAMPA version. If the phonetic symbols are correctly displayed below, please select the Unicode version of each page.]

Throughout you can choose [SAMPA] or [Unicode].

Phonemic symbols for RP vowels are as follows:

• /i/, SAMPA /i/ for the vowel of heed (= he'd)
• /ɩ/*, SAMPA /I/ hid
• /ɛ/, SAMPA /E/ head
• /æ/, SAMPA /{/, /æ/ had (stressed)
• /ɑ/, SAMPA /A/ hard
• /ɒ/, SAMPA /Q/ hod
• /ɔ/, SAMPA /O/ haw'd (rhymes with Maud; may or may not be the same as hoard)
• /ɷ/*, SAMPA /U/ hood
• /u/, SAMPA /u/ who'd (rhymes with mood)
• /ʌ/, SAMPA /V/ Hud (rhymes with mud)
• /ɜ/, SAMPA /3/ heard (= herd)

The above transcription is called the 'Narrow Transcription' by Jones [21, p. 343].

In accordance with the usual custom, phonetic (allophonic) symbols are placed between square brackets [ ], and phonemic symbols between slants / /.

Square brackets also enclose bibliographical references.

* used in preference to the older symbols ɪ, ʊ.

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