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#8: American English pronunciation of the five long vowel sounds

Learn which sounds are long vowels and how to correctly pronounce them.
Transcript

Hi again everyone, it's me, Mandy. Welcome to Settle Learning Academy's eighth American English Pronunciation Podcast. I hope you're enjoying the shows. Today we are going to begin a difficult set of shows about vowel sounds. Actually, today's show isn't that hard, but the next couple of weeks will have harder topics. We talked a little about vowels last week when I introduced the semi-vowels, the w sound and y sound. Speaking of the w sound and y sound, do you remember our practice sentence from that show? "Will you watch TV quietly while I'm working?"

How about the r-controlled vowel practice from the week before? "Learning early in the morning can be fairly hard work."

And before that we had my favorite practice sentence, "I would really like a little red wagon like Laura's." That sentence is also great for practicing the w sound. Just because those episodes are in the past, don't forget about them; it will be very helpful for you to go back to them and practice them once in a while. And, you'll be surprised when they have suddenly become easier.

So, vowels. Our alphabet has five vowels, a, e, i, o, and u. But we have 15 vowel sounds. There are many reasons that vowels are so hard, both to teach about and to learn about. One reason is terminology, vocabulary. I don't teach pronunciation using the International Phonetic Alphabet or symbols of any kind. I do this because dictionaries do not have one standard symbol library that they all use, and because you can't see the symbol I would be talking about. Although, even when teaching in person I use names instead of symbols. Once you know the name of the sound, you know exactly what I am talking about when I say that name. However, just as dictionaries don't use standard symbols, linguists don't use standard names. Can you see the problems arising already?

So the names I have chosen to use for our 15 different vowel sounds come from two places; one is the elementary schools of the United States, and the other is from their spelling. Today I'm only going to talk about one set of vowel sounds; the long vowels. Next week, you guessed it; I'll talk about short vowels.

This vocabulary "long vowel" or "short vowel" comes from elementary school and teaching kids how to read. Those teachers also need to name their sounds, and so the very, very, VERY old terminology of long and short vowels lives on. When I say old, I mean centuries old. The terminology is so old that they no longer correctly describe the sounds. Yet, in all the wisdom of our public schools this terminology is still used very frequently. Basically, 2 to 5 hundred years ago, long vowels sounded differently than they do now. Then a phenomenon called "The Great Vowel Shift" happened, and the pronunciation of each vowel changed. But the vocabulary didn't. So don't let the name of the sound confuse you! Long vowel does NOT mean that it is said for more time! Although, some long vowels are pronounced for longer than their short vowel counterparts.

So, what sounds am I talking about when I say "long vowel"? Well, when we teach kids how to read, we tell them that a long vowel sound says its name, a, e, i, o, or u. So, the long a sound sounds like (long a), as in the word cake c-a-k-e. For our vowel sounds, in addition to having some practice sentences, we will have key words. A key word is the word I will always refer back to when I want to compare sounds. The key word for the long a sound is the word cake. The word cake has three sounds, (k sound, long a, k sound), even though it has four letters. Don't confuse letters with sounds. Do you hear the long a? (long a) cake. If I wanted to get technical with this sound, I would mention that the end of the long a has a very br

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