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Pronunciation Guide for English
In the English writing system, many of the graphemes (letters and letter groups) have more than one possible pronunciation.
Sometimes, specific sequences of letters can alert the reader to the possible pronunciation required; for example, note the letter sequences shown as ‘hollow letters’ in this guide as in
‘watch’, ‘salt’ and ‘city’ - indicating that, in these words with these letter patterns, letter a is usually code for the /o/ sound and letter c is always code for the /s/ sound. Slash marks around a letter or letters - for example, /o/, /s/ or /sh/ - indicate a sound – usually at the level of the phoneme – the smallest unit of sound identifiable in speech.
This Pronunciation Guide is not comprehensive as it does not include all the graphemes and sounds in the English language. The guide is based on letters, groups of letters, and common spelling patterns, which generally have more than one pronunciation dependent on the words themselves. This is NOT the same as an Alphabetic Code Chart based on ALL the phonemes.
Some of the word examples in the Pronunciation Guide below are words used commonly but they have very unusual spellings, for example: ‘any’, ‘said’, ‘pretty’, ‘women’ and ‘choir’.
The

guide

below

cannot

be

definitive

about

how

to

pronounce

each

word

because

pronunciations vary according to regional or national accents in the English language. The complexity of the Pronunciation Guide demonstrates the advisability of teaching the English alphabetic code

(the

grapheme-phoneme

correspondences)

for

reading,

and

for

spelling,

systematically and thoroughly. Some learners are able to deduce the alphabetic code for themselves through lots of book experience and writing experience as they mature (although they may not fully appreciate that they are ‘picking up’ what is known as the alphabetic code – or alphabetic principle). Other