Diphthongs are connected vowel sounds that vary in number across languages. Vowels are sounds without obstruction, while consonants have restricted airflow. Vowels are characterized by tongue position, lip shape, and front/back position. When vowels come together, they can form diphthongs or remain separate. Diphthongs have a nucleus and off-glide, with three main ones in Standard English. Other languages have more diphthongs, and there are also tripthongs.
Diphthongs are types of vowels in which two vowel sounds are connected in a continuous flowing motion. They are often sliding voice calls. Most languages have a number of diphthongs, although that number varies widely, from one or two to fifteen or more.
A vowel is a specific type of sound, characterized by a lack of complete obstruction to the flow of air. Vowels may be contrasted with consonants, where there is such an obstruction. When air escapes when you speak a consonant, there is a build up of pressure as the airflow is restricted. When pronouncing a vowel, there is no pressure built up, the sound is simply shaped by the position of the tongue.
Vowels are generally characterized by three different criteria: the position of the tongue in the mouth relative to the palate (height), the position of the tongue in the front or back of the mouth (posterior), and the shape of the lips as the vowel sound is produced. (rounding). There are other things that can characterize vowels, but they aren’t very common in English: things like the position of the tongue root, for example, rarely affect English vowels, although they do affect vowels in many African languages.
When vowels come together, they can be two distinct syllables or they can merge into one syllable. When they come together, they form so-called diphthongs. If they remain separate they are simply two monophthongs. An example of two single syllable vowels can be seen in the word triage, where the i and a are both pronounced alone. An example of a diphthong can be seen in the word topo, where the ou part of the word obviously consists of two distinct vowels, but there is no syllabic break between the two.
Diphthongs can usually be seen as having two distinct parts: the nucleus and the off-glide. The nucleus of the diphthong is the most stressed vowel and forms the center of the sound, while the off-glide is the vowel that appears to flow into or out of the nucleus vowel.
The three main diphthongs in Standard English, known as phonemic diphthongs, are ai, aw, and oy. All three of these diphthongs are very common, and many people simply think of them as single vowels in some contexts. For example, in the English word laugh, the i would be transcribed phonetically as ai. Although it appears as a single letter in our writing, it actually consists of two vowels – if you say the word you should be able to hear the two. Similarly, the word how contains the diphthong aw at the end and the word boy contains the diphthong oy.
Other diphthongs in Standard English are the ei sound in the word hunger or the pronunciation of the letter a, and the ou sound in the word phone. Other languages have many more diphthongs beyond these, and other dialects of English may have more diphthongs as well. Languages like Finnish have nearly twenty diphthongs, while the Received Pronunciation dialect of English has about five more diphthongs not found in standard English.
In addition to diphthongs and monophthongs, there are also so-called tripthongs. These are similar to diphthongs, but instead of simply switching from one vowel sound to another, a third sound is also added.
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