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Symbols for American English Vowel Sounds

A typical dialect of American English has about 15 distinctive vowel sounds. Here their symbols are linked to Sun-style .au samples lifted from the ibiblio (Sunsite) archive (where they are listed without the .au extension).

The first symbol is the International Phonetic Association (IPA) symbol for the sound. (For the diphthongs, the American style of transcription is to use a -y where the standard IPA uses a 'j'.)
The second is the Sun name for the phoneme sample (which is in most cases the same as the symbol used by First Byte in Monologue for Windows and its DOS forebears).
The third symbol is the ipa-ascii symbol (an alphabet for use on Usenet groups and email).
The fourth column has the symbol that Rsynth displays in its verbose mode.
The fifth column contains the SAMPA symbol--as you can see, the differences among these alphabets are minor.
Each row concludes with a key word for the sound.

**Front Vowels**
	S u n	IPAascii	Rsynth	Sampa	KeyWord
h i g h l o w	IY	i	i	i	beet
	IH	I	I	I	bit
	EY	eI	eI	e	bait
	EH	E	e	E	bet
	AE	&	&	{	at

**Back Vowels**
	S u n	IPAascii	Rsynth	Sampa	KeyWord
h i g h . l o w	UY	u	u	u	boot
	UH	U	U	U	book
	OW	oU	oU	o	boat
	AO	O	O	O	cause
	AA	a/A	A	A	cot ¹

**Central Vowels**
	IPA	S u n	IPAascii	Rsynth	Sampa	KeyWord
		AX	@	@	@	about
		AH	V	V	V	but²

**Diphthongs**
S u n	IPAascii	Rsynth	Sampa	KeyWord
AY	aI	aI	aI	bite
OY	OI	OI	OI	boy
AW	AU	aU	aU	bough

Notes

Some would list "ju" (use not same as ooze

"R-colored" or rhoticized vowels (such as those in beard, heard, hard are hard to discriminate and are absent in "r-drop" or non-rhotic dialects such as those typical of the North American South and New England region, and Received Pronunciation in GB. In these latter dialects, the preceding vowel is usually lengthened and often glides toward the central schwa sound. IPA hangs a little "r-hook"diacritic off of the symbol for an r-colored vowel.

PhonAtlas logo

A much higher level of magnification can be had from the Phonological Atlas of North America. Especially germane is the text and illustrations of William Labov's recent paper on acoustic analysis of data on variation, especially key Northern cities and Southern (US) vowel shifts. For the whole enchilada, see the National Map

Footnotes

¹Though it occurs in some New England dialects (path, tomato), back low unrounded ("Cardinal 5") sound (script a) is absent from most North American dialects, where the low, back, unrounded "a" is pronounced to various considerable degrees more forward in the mouth. Moreover, in Canadian and much of US speech, the vowels of cause and cot have merged. (See Atlas of North American English)
²These central vowels are very close; often the inverted V is used to distinguish a stressed central vowel from an unstressed one (for which inverted e --schwa--is used).

After Notes

Check out my page of vowel spectrograms and the JavOICe sonifier.

JavaScript special: If you have or can enable Javascript on your browser, try opening a secondary window with British/American Vowels.

It may help to compare the triple reading around the Cardinal Vowel Quadrilateral by John Wells, Susan Ramsaran, and Peter Ladefoged to those given here. Bear well in mind, however, that the Cardinal framework is for placing the vowels of all languages, not just English, and the matchup is approximate and incomplete.