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The Speech Sounds of English
Norwegian Learners' Problems - introduction
English, like any other language, has a number of speech sounds which function as basic building blocks of the spoken language. In (Standard British) English there are 44 such speech sounds, divided into different categories, the most basic categories being VOWELS and CONSONANTS.
These speech sounds are called PHONEMES. A phoneme may be defined as the smallest language unit that is able to distinguish meaning. A MINIMAL PAIR (a pair of words that differ in one sound only), for example pan and ban , illustrates this quite clearly. By replacing with , the meaning of the word is completely changed, even though the two sounds in this case are very similar.The phonemes are abstract units that may come out in different forms. If you experiment by pronouncing the words <KEY> and <CAR>, and isolate the in both words, you will hear that the two sounds are quite different from each other. That can be explained by the quality of the following vowels. If variants of a phoneme are decided by the sound context as in the example above, we refer to these variants as ALLOPHONES of a phoneme.
As an English teacher you should be able to recognize and use the phonemic alphabet. Quite a few of the symbols used are easily recognizable, as they correspond to ordinary spelling (like , for example), but others, like or , are specially designed to symbolize a speech sound. Most English dictionaries today use the same phonemic alphabet, which has been agreed upon by the International Phonetic Association (IPA). That is also the system we use in this course.
Norwegian and English are different languages with different sound systems, but because of their common origin as Germanic languages they also share a number of characteristics when it comes to speech sounds. Many Norwegian and English sounds are (to all intents and purposes) the same, for example /,,,,,,,,,,/, and those sounds are therefore not dealt with as such in connection with Norwegian learners' problems. We concentrate on speech sounds and contrasts that tend to create difficulties for Norwegians, either because of interference from Norwegian sounds (i.e. sounds that are similar but not identical in the two languages, is an example of that) or because we do not have the English speech sound in Norwegian, for example , and .
For that reason we deal with the following phonemes
or phoneme pairs / contrasts:
VOWELS:
/, , / as in <beat>, <bit>
and <city>
/,/ as in <bet> and <bat>
// as in <cut>
/, , / as in <cart>, <court> and <cot>
/, / as in <fool> and <full>
// as in <burn>
// as in <butter>
/, , / as in <bay>, <bye> and <boy>
/, / as in <no> and <now>
/, / as in <beer> and <bear>
CONSONANTS:
// as in <zinc>
/, , , / as in <ash>, <Asia>, <chin>,
<gin>
/, / as in <veal> and <wheel>
/, / as in <think> and <this>
// as in <lean> and <sell>
// as in <red>
/, / as in <tore> and <door>
