Portal:Phonology

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1 Phonology & Pronunciation Portal

This site includes handouts on:

  • Segmentals - vowels and consonants
  • Prosody - intonation, rhythm, stress
  • Prosodic effects - natural speech phenomena such as assimilation (blending), linking (liaison), contractions, and others
  • Pronunciation pedagogy

Most are currently in the form of old PDF handouts; more wiki pages with updated contents will be added over time. Scroll down for a full list of entries.


1.1 Phonology & Pronunciation Overview

Teaching or learning pronunciation requires at least some knowledge of applied phonology. Phonology refers to the general sound system of a language (how sounds are organized in the language), while phonetics deals with more specific sounds and how they are produced. Teachers will benefit from some basic knowledge of both fields. Here are some starters for teachers.

Here are a few basic handouts on phonetics that are relevant to phonology neophytes, as phonetics is foundational to phonology.


1.2 Vowels & Consonants

Vowels and consonants are called segmentals - individual sounds into which words can be segmented. Phonemes are general sound categories that are distinctive in the language; e.g., /b/ and /p/ are considered different sounds in English, since bat is a distinctly different word from pat.

1.3 Phonemes

1.3.1 Wiki pages

1.3.2 Links / PDFs


1.4 Consonants

1.4.1 Wiki pages

1.4.2 Links / PDFs


1.5 Vowels

1.5.1 Wiki pages

1.5.2 Links / PDFs

1.6 Consonant - vowel interactions and morphology

1.6.1 Wiki pages

1.6.2 Links/PDFs

Morphology refers to word formation, e.g., by means of prefixes and suffixes; these often involve pronunciation changes and variant forms, such as multiple pronunciations of -ed and plural -s.


1.7 Other Links


1.8 Youtube Videos

My own Youtube videos on pronunciation and phonology will hopefully start appearing in 2017. But these are a good start.

1.8.1 Pronunciation teaching videos

1.8.2 Other videos

1.9 Featured pedagogy & practice items


1.12 Phonology & pronunciation topics


1.13 Stress, Intonation, Prosody

Above the level of segmentals (vowels, consontants) are suprasegmentals - intonation and stress patterns. These suprasegmentals interact sometimes with the segmental pronunciation, in the form of contractions, blending of sounds (assimilation), cutting off sounds (truncation), and such (natural and fast speech phenomena). Prosody refers to the rhythm of the language, which is affected by suprasegmental features and these related speech phenomena.

1.14 Word stress

1.15 Stress and intonation beyond word level

1.16 Overview of prosody

1.16.1 Stress, intonation, prosodic effects




1.17 List of portals

1.18 List of category pages





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