Does English Have 20 vowels?

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Hello noble ones, welcome to Academy and up the irons. So today I would like to do a reaction video to Simon Roper who is, if you don't know him, he makes phenomenal videos, very detailed, usually the ones I like the most are dealing with like medieval English, Anglo-Saxon and that kind of stuff, but he also has these really interesting questions such as does English really have 20 vowels? I love the question.

[00:00:22]Now, channel with 289,000 subscribers, in one day 8,000 views, I hate to see it. It kind of looks like the kind of troubles that I'm having both with this channel and my main channel, my other channels on YouTube. We know a lot of good creators have been affected by low views, which is one of the reasons why I decided to react to this one cuz I want to give it give it a like and I want to give it a little extra exposure and a little extra push. So if you do see this, uh we won't react to the whole thing, we'll watch a little bit and then for the rest, please click the link in the description below, leave them a comment, give them a like so that the this perhaps will signal the algorithm to help him out a little bit because he really does deserve it. And with that without further ado, let's watch it.

[00:01:02]>> How many vowels does English have? How many vowels does English have? I'm asking not in terms of letters but in terms of actual contrastive vowel sounds. It's possible to do a fairly deep dive on this subject and as I I start writing the script for this video, I dread to think how long it will end up being. Um well firstly it depends on your accent. Some varieties of English have two vowels where others only have one. For example, in my accent, the words put and cut have two different vowels of >> and uh whereas in my father's accent, which was from the north of England, uh there would only have been one vowel in both of these words.

[00:01:36]>> Oh yeah, because they pronounce it a bit like So yeah, I would say put and cut. I guess in the north put and cut. I guess, maybe. I don't know if I did it right, you let me know.

[00:01:47]It's put cut. Whereas in the north of England, uh there would only have been one vowel in both of these words, put cut. Uh-huh.

[00:01:54]>> But they both have the same vowel. Cool.

[00:01:55]>> Because I have a distinction between uh and uh which he didn't have being northern. Um so I'm going to use my own accent as a central reference point in this video, not because I think other accents aren't as deserving of attention but because I'm less likely to make major mistakes and I can also use myself as a kind of intuition meter stick because it's my accent.

[00:02:16]>> Uh-huh. Love his accent.

[00:02:18]>> middle-of-the-road description of my accent would count around 20 vowels and I'm going to say the vowels and flash an example word of each one on the screen.

[00:02:29]Okay. a e i o u a e i e i o u u oi ei i oi au ou uu Okay, look. I know I don't know if he's going to actually read each one of these. As a non-native, I want to try and pronounce them the way I would naturally do them. So I'll ignore the International Phonetic Alphabet for a moment and I'll just try and read them how I would to see if we have a similar vowel system or not, meaning that if I picked up a vowel system from his area or not. I would say trap, dress, kit, put, lot, cut, start, square, near, force, nurse, pure, price, face, fleece, choice, mouth, goat, goose.

[00:03:30]That's how I would pronounce them. Are we similar? Maybe. You tell me if you're native. In previous videos, I've mentioned the 20 or so vowels of my kind of English and compared them to the five vowels of standard Spanish or the three of standard Arabic or Pirahã. But somebody in the comments pointed out that this might not be the best comparison. Standard Spanish is normally analyzed as having five vowels, a e i o u. Apologies if I've said them with a slight English accent.

[00:04:00]But in Spanish, you can have situations where there's a sequence of two vowels one after the other as in the word bacalao. Yeah, of course. And even like any I is simply because you spell them with a little single letter in English like in time, uh we have the I combination in Italian as well. It's just that we use two graphemes to represent it but generally speaking, the vowel is still similar. Uh maybe with less nasalization depending on which variety of English we're talking about but in general, it's similar and related. Another thing is that and I imagine he's going to talk about it is is quantity and quality because that should also be addressed.

[00:04:37]If there are accents that differentiate between vowel length, particularly if it's phonemic, Japanese does that for instance, should be added into the mix.

[00:04:48]And then uh stress could be a way to determine that even in languages like modern Italian which generally speaking doesn't use phonemic vowel length like Latin did but we do when we stress a word and the stress obviously always falls in the vowel's nucleus, then that also comes with a little bit of an increasing volume of diction and slight extension of the vowel length. So that could also be discussed. And then last but not least, quantity. So there is a difference at least in Italian while you study, oh there are five vowels in Italian. Right, but in in reality, most speakers, exception some areas and some regions, but most speakers will have at least seven because there are degrees of a versus e and o versus o and I do think that those exist in Spanish too and definitely they exist in French cuz you have uh e i. Yeah, so quality also, how open, how closed the vowel is. Yeah, it's definitely yeah. I I agree with the commentators.

[00:05:50]>> ow ow Mistake alert, um I'd never seen it phonetically transcribed before but it seems like bacalao actually has a syllable break Okay.

[00:05:59]>> in between the a and the o. Okay, with that.

[00:06:02]>> um a better example might be Europa Okay.

[00:06:06]>> um because I think that eu there is an actual diphthong. Cool.

[00:06:10]>> Um so just imagine I'm saying that for the next 30 seconds.

[00:06:14]Likewise, uh in Pirahã, uh there are three vowels, roughly a i o.

[00:06:21]But again, you can have situations where there are two vowels in a row as in the word ishiishi. In that word, in the middle syllable, there are two i sounds in a row which comes out as just a lengthened e. Ishiishi. The thing is, English has situations like these as well.

[00:06:41]In my dialect of English, the word mouth has an a followed by a w. ow ow mouth Yeah. And yet on my on my list of 20 vowels, I counted ow as a separate vowel in its own right. Mhm. Uh a phoneme in its own right within the vowel system.

[00:07:01]Likewise, a vowel like uh spared has a long air >> Right. which you could possibly analyze as just being two short e sounds in a row. Spared. Mhm. But again, in my list of 20 vowels, I counted air as its own distinct phoneme. Freaking love this guy. Uh another example that comes to me is machine which is probably Is it the only case in which the because usually the I is either uh as in sit or I as in Skype. It was time, whatever.

[00:07:36]But machine is probably one of the few Is it the only one where you spell it as an I but pronounce it as a long E? It's the only one I can think of.

[00:07:45]You let me know in the comments.

[00:07:48]So why is it that I'm allowed to count ow and air as distinct phonemes when Spanish analyses of Spanish don't tend to count ow as a separate phoneme and analyses of Pirahã don't tend to count the long e as a separate phoneme. Why is English an exception here? My reflexive answer would be based on native speaker intuition.

[00:08:13]Based on my experience with Spanish speakers, they're much more likely to perceive that ow in bacalao as being a sequence of a followed by o. It just seems obvious to them. Yeah.

[00:08:24]>> Whereas for an English speaker, um it's not as straightforward to break down the ow in mouse. Mhm.

[00:08:32]>> From a phonetic point of view, it's obviously a combination of a and something like w but I I would expect most native speakers to have a little bit more trouble realizing that.

[00:08:43]Fascinating.

[00:08:44]>> like sound to me doesn't feel like it has an a in it even though it does.

[00:08:50]>> Mhm. Um we we are more likely to perceive diphthongs as being irreducible segments in their own right rather than sequences of two sounds.

[00:09:02]mouth bass Mhm.

[00:09:05]And do those two words have any sounds in common? mouth bass >> She's going to say no.

[00:09:12]No. Oh wow.

[00:09:13]>> don't think that the ow sounds anything like the a? No.

[00:09:18]Not at all? No.

[00:09:19]Okay. mouth and bass Mhm. Do those two words have any sounds in common between them?

[00:09:26]I guess so. Like the a but that's all I could That's interesting. say So in that case, why is it that Spanish speakers tend to perceive things one way and English speakers tend to perceive them another way? Probably a spelling situation. Well, one obvious possible answer is spelling. Spanish has a very transparent spelling system. uh You know, that ow sequence is spelt a o um which um you know, in in standard Spanish orthography would suggest a o ow.

[00:10:02]And so, as Spanish children are learning to read, perhaps they just implicitly pick up that these diphthongs are sequences of one vowel followed by an >> I confirm that with Italian, which is a similar situation. I confirm his intuition is correct. other.

[00:10:16]In English, this is obviously less clear-cut. The word mouth is spelled m o u t h, but it's not pronounced mowuth. You know, it's not pronounced maw- mawth. Um it's pronounced mouth.

[00:10:29]And so, English speakers are less likely to develop an implicit understanding of how diphthongs are composed. Maybe that feeds into it.

[00:10:38]You know what's funny is that what this creates is that sometimes it's easier for me to remember spelling than my native wife, cuz she's American, so she speaks English natively. But sometimes when she's like, "Man, how do you spell that?" And I know it because I mean, she's great at spelling. I'm not saying anything, but it does happen occasionally that I know the spelling of a word. And the reason is that I can spell it in Italian, which makes it so much easier. So, for instance, Minute Maid uh right, it's an easy one, but like I would in English I would have even if I say minute I would have to remember that it's m i n u t e rather than m i n i t e, which could both be pronounced minute if you really think about it. And not to mention made uh yeah, m a i d but couldn't it be m a d e?

[00:11:29]You know what I mean? Uh in Italian, I just think minute maid. If I read it as it as if it were written in Italian there is no way for me to to forget the the way it's uh it's spelled. Uh because again, there is one usually one sound correlated to one letter. Uh which makes it a lot easier. Let's say we were to adopt a Spanish style analysis of the English vowel system postulating as few contrastive vowel phonemes as possible and explaining all of the other vowels as sequences of two sounds.

[00:12:04]If possible, I think it would be best to treat these, the short lax checked vowels, as the basic actual vowel phonemes of this dialect. a e i o u Because they're arguably the simplest, most straightforward ones.

[00:12:20]They're generally fairly short in length, and they're generally monophthongs, meaning that there's only one target tongue posture, one target sound. Just a rather than ow.

[00:12:32]For reasons that will become clear, we should probably also throw in the unstressed vowel uh as in about.

[00:12:39]For these diphthongs, I'm going to assume that the second element of each diphthong, the bit on the right as it's written is a w or y glide. Dr. Geoff Lindsey explains why this is a good analysis in this video.

[00:12:52]So, for these seven diphthongs, we now just have to fill in the nuclear part, the a in ow, the o in oy, and so on.

[00:13:03]You have to do a little bit of fiddling around here.

[00:13:06]In precise phonetic terms, not all of these diphthongs start with a sound that exists as a stand-alone short vowel in the dialect.

[00:13:14]For example, oy doesn't exactly start with my vowel in lot, got. Otherwise, it would be slightly opener. Oy. Oy, which it is in some dialects, but not the one we're analyzing here.

[00:13:28]Oy versus oy.

[00:13:30]But that doesn't matter too much, because we can just posit an allophonic rule o raises to o when it comes before y.

[00:13:39]Permitting allophonic rules, I think the analysis is fairly straightforward.

[00:13:44]I starts with the vowel phoneme of cut cut, kite.

[00:13:48]>> Mhm.

[00:13:49]A starts with the vowel of dress dress, drape.

[00:13:54]E starts with the vowel of kit kit, key.

[00:13:57]Oh, this is phenomenal to see.

[00:13:59]Um yeah, price uh price. Yeah, at least in this accent, for sure. Like there are so many variation of how this is pronounced, though.

[00:14:10]But yeah, again, he's focusing on one, but this one alone takes even this one, right? Because I would say face. I've heard people say face. I've heard people say fierce.

[00:14:20]Right? Well, so many accents. I love the accents aspect of it. And even this one, the goat vowel, o. Some people pronounce it goat goat goat goat or though or though.

[00:14:35]Um goat goat goat goat.

[00:14:39]Goat.

[00:14:41]Goat.

[00:14:42]So many versions.

[00:14:44]Freaking love it.

[00:14:45]Oy starts with the vowel of lot lot, Lloyd.

[00:14:50]Ow starts with the trap vowel trap, trout.

[00:14:54]O starts with the unstressed vowel about, open.

[00:15:00]And oo starts with the should vowel should, shoot.

[00:15:06]Again, I would suggest that this is completely unintuitive to most native English speakers, at least of my dialect. Yeah, so basically native speakers pick it up by imitation. They don't And that's normal, by the way, because there are a lot of unintuitive aspects of language learning that natives know how to do, but don't know why they do it. They don't know They don't even know how they do it.

[00:15:25]It happens a lot. This is why I mean, learning from natives is fantastic, but there are some specific aspects of linguistics that you cannot learn from natives unless they're linguists or at least versed in that specific matter. Uh it's it's how it is.

[00:15:38]They might even end end ending up telling you a completely different thing that is not even true. This does happen.

[00:15:45]But if our goal is just to have as few vowel phonemes as possible, it works.

[00:15:50]This is as good a time as any to briefly plug our upcoming web series Living Memory. Let's go. Each episode is set in a different decade with the goal of showing realistic, grounded stories set against the backdrop of recent history.

[00:16:04]The first four episodes will be released on this channel soon, and you can subscribe to our mailing list if you're interested in receiving updates.

[00:16:13]Thank you to my long-time collaborators Scott Burchell, Tom Burchell, Mark Micco, and all of the other people who've helped steer the creative direction of this project.

[00:16:22]Now, back to the video.

[00:16:25]Fascinating.

[00:16:25]>> So, we've used the short lax checked vowels plus the unstressed vowel as our basic phonemes, and we've explained how they form these diphthongs.

[00:16:35]The last category is these long linking r vowels, a e i o u.

[00:16:42]Because these tend to be held for longer and they tend to be monophthongs for me, having only one target sound rather than two, perhaps it's possible to just analyze them as either >> I wonder if he says pure or pure. I say pure. That's the way I've heard it in England.

[00:16:59]And I just mimicked it, copied it. Pure apple juice.

[00:17:03]I don't know why that one came back to memory.

[00:17:06]Does he say pure?

[00:17:08]Pure pure pure pure. Pure, of course, his his accent is non-rhotic, so he's not going to say pure.

[00:17:14]Pure. Pure.

[00:17:16]two short vowels one after the other, as in piraha, or as long versions of the short vowels, which simply don't get counted in the overall list of phonemic vowels.

[00:17:27]Again, some of them don't totally match up phonetically with their short counterparts, but this can be put down to allophonic differences. The long vowels just have slightly different qualities to the short ones.

[00:17:39]To give some example long-short pairs under this analysis starter has the long vowel, stutter has the short. Yes. Spared is long sped.

[00:17:49]Beard is long bid. Short is long shot.

[00:17:52]Pure is long push.

[00:17:54]>> does say Yeah, he says pure. Us is long about. Mhm. Those last two don't have any perfect minimal pairs as far as I can work out, because the pure vowel usually comes after y, and the about vowel only occurs in unstressed syllables.

[00:18:10]So, it's possible to produce an analysis with only seven basic vowel phonemes.

[00:18:16]I'd be interested to hear if anyone can think of any obvious reasons why this analysis absolutely doesn't work. I'll go over some of my own later.

[00:18:25]As I've said, I, as a native speaker, find our analysis of the diphthongs somewhat unintuitive. It doesn't feel like there's an o phoneme in the word choice or an a phoneme in the word time.

[00:18:37]As a non-native speaker, instead to me, it it does make sense to think of them as separate.

[00:18:44]Fascinating. I'll give it 30 more seconds.

[00:18:46]But many native speakers would say the same thing about the long vowels, the linking r vowels, perhaps for similar spelling-related reasons. Mhm.

[00:18:56]The vowels in start, square, near, force, pure, nurse uh as I've said, are generally phonetically long monophthongal vowels for me.

[00:19:06]As we've seen, you can form basically perfect long-short minimal pairs, as in sped versus spared.

[00:19:14]Okay. So, we're 12 minutes in, which is exactly half of the video. Not exactly, but I'm not a mathematician. Uh I want to stop here so that I give people an incentive to go and finish watching the video, because as they say, I really want to boost it. This video He put a lot of work on it. It's fully scripted.

[00:19:30]I also produce sometimes fully scripted videos. I used to do it more often uh before the algorithm went nuts, because for obvious reasons, it is really difficult for us as content creators to dedicate so much time into a video that then gets shadowbanned by the con- the algorithm. And uh yeah, and and then you put like 3 weeks into producing it, that's going to be colossally it would good it's going to be a monumental problem whereas if you make shorter easier videos even if they get banned or blocked or throttled then it's not as much of a loss.

[00:20:01]But I hate it when I see this happen to very good channels. So please go check it out and thank you very much for watching.

[00:20:09]Bye.

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