Systematic transcription of English consonants

Table 3.1 contains the set of symbols used here for representing the consonants of English at a systematic level. The transcription is broad and general, and does not attempt to represent differences between varieties. Illustrations of the sounds that the symbols stand for are underlined. The soundis put in brackets because some speakers do not use this sound, but use [w] in its place. Where letters of English spelling appear between parentheses, this shows that not all speakers will have appropriate examples of the relevant sound; for example, not everyone pronounces the finalof ‘error’

For vowels, it is much more difficult to provide a systematic transcription system. The reason for this is that vowels are extremely variable across varieties of English. We look at vowels of English in more detail, including some of the issues of transcribing and representing vowels.