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The close-mid back rounded vowel is usually diphthongized to [oʊ] or [əʊ] in North America and respectively, Britain.

Examples: row, also.

In fact, in the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary I didn't see o standing by itself.
In some other languages, you can pronounce it just by itself. How common is that and why is English different?

Bogdan Lataianu
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4 Answers4

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English high and mid non-central vowel phonemes fall into two categories:

  1. tense /i e o u/
  2. lax /ɪ ɛ ɔ ʊ/

Beside the tense/lax phonetic distinction (which refers to the muscles at the root of the tongue), these phonemes are distinguished in several other ways -- language loves redundancy and builds it into the structure whenever possible.

For instance, all the tense vowel phonemes are diphthongized, whereas the lax vowels are pure vowels, which may be neutralized with their tense counterpart in some environments (Mary, merry, marry), but never appear with an offglide except in local variants.

In the high vowels /i, u/ the diphthongization isn't always distinctive because the tongue gesture is so short, but it's there and shows up in transitional /y/s and /w/s in phrases like be able or do it. It's clearer in the mid vowels, where the distance the tongue has to move going from [e] to [i] or [o] to [u] is longer and more easily distinguished.

Indeed, pronunciation of Spanish /e/ as /ei/ and /o/ as /ou/ is one of the characteristics of an English accent. English speakers are normally unable to distinguish the two in Spanish, just as Spanish speakers are normally unable to distinguish English tense vowels from lax, leading to ship sheep late let Paul pole foot boot vocabulary problems.

There are complexities. In RP, as noted, the actual diphthong is centralized to [əʊ], and the Northern Cities Chain Shift has screwed up urban American English vowels almost as thoroughly as what the Great Vowel Shift did to Middle English vowels.

jlawler
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  • I think final vowels are never short, such as in limbo, libido, flambe, emigre, apriori, alumni etc. Maybe this is related to a late consequence of Great Vowel Shift, since these words look like late borrowings from other languages. – Bogdan Lataianu Jan 17 '14 at 15:57
  • I reread your post and y is short in merry/Mary/marry – Bogdan Lataianu Jan 18 '14 at 01:11
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    There isn't any y in those words. They end in /i/. We're talking about pronunciation, not spelling. And English hasn't had distinctive long vowels since the Great Vowel Shift, when the long vowels diphthongized and the short vowels didn't. – jlawler Jan 18 '14 at 03:43
  • Why do you describe the diphthongization of tense vowels as distinctive and write it with slashes? – Greg Lee Aug 20 '15 at 19:26
  • Because in American English all the tense vowels are diphthongized, as well as tense. There are phonemic diphthongs, too -- /aw, ay, oy/ -- with those I write the diphthong target between slashes; but the tense vowels are effectively single unit phonemes that happen to be predictably diphthongized. – jlawler Aug 20 '15 at 20:06
  • When you tell me the tense vowels are single unit phonemes which are predictably diphthongized, I interpret that to mean than the diphthongization is not phonemic and not distinctive, yet you say it's distinctive and write it as though it were phonemic. Puzzling. – Greg Lee Aug 20 '15 at 21:08
  • vowels which are tense are also diphthongized. Either predicts the other, both are distinctive and therefore segments with either characteristic are identifiable as unit phonemes, contrasting with the other vowel phonemes, which are neither tense nor diphthongized. – jlawler Aug 20 '15 at 22:58
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    @BogdanLataianu At least for American English, the fact that “short” vowels never end words is way more important than the fact that they are “short,” because vowel length is pretty much irrelevant here. The only sensible distinction between vowel phonemes you can make for my accent (GenAm with mild Inland North features) is checked vs free - not long vs short, diphthong vs monophthong, or tense vs lax (those last two being probably the most opaque terms in all of phonetics). – Graham H. Jul 22 '23 at 00:40
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In British English, actually, the diphthongization is [əʊ], while [oʊ] is more US pronunciation.

English doesn't have a single [o] in words, because it's a short vowel and English doesn't have a short "o" sound. The case where it's not followed by [ʊ] is [ɔ:], as in caught.

If you look at this page about English Phonology, and you look at the table reporting the vowels in English, you'll see that the box for "mid back short" is empty.

Alenanno
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  • Indeed, I was talking about US English. – Bogdan Lataianu Dec 01 '11 at 18:51
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    @Theta30 You mentioned the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary though. :) – Alenanno Dec 01 '11 at 19:11
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    That dictionary shows US pronunciations too – Bogdan Lataianu Dec 01 '11 at 19:12
  • In the IPA Handbook, Ladefoged doesn't have [ɔ] in his vowel chart for American English. – Alex B. Dec 01 '11 at 19:26
  • However, I do know that in some US dialects that vowel is present. Wells (Longman Pronunciation Dictionary) has [a:] for American English (where in British English you usually find [ɔ:]. However, the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th. ed.) uses both [ɔ:] and [a:]. I don't know what the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English uses for American English (I don't have a copy at home). – Alex B. Dec 01 '11 at 19:35
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    @Theta30 I don't know every dictionary, if you don't specify I am not able to know that. Alex, I was trying to look for a word with [ɔ] but wasn't able to find anything. I originally thought about it, but when I saw that in that chart it wasn't available AND that I couldn't think of any word with it, I thought I was wrong... :) – Alenanno Dec 01 '11 at 19:37
  • @BogdanLataianu: If your question is specifically and only about American English you should really edit your question to say so. Stack Exchange prefers questions to be as specific as possible. Remember, the questions and answers here are more for all the people searching for the same question in the future than they are for you. – hippietrail Dec 02 '11 at 12:50
  • @hippietrail In some sense, my question is relevant to British too. I think [oʊ] is closer to [əʊ], than to [o] in terms of pronunciation. The schwa can be seen as an unstressed [o]. – Bogdan Lataianu Dec 08 '11 at 08:29
  • @BogdanLataianu: I know from experience that I'm not good at analysing diphthongs into phones so I always go by what real linguists say. I have noted in the last decade or so that more and more dictionaries are updating the IPA used in their transcriptions to more closely reflect the phonetics (not just phonology) of the local dialect. The Macquarie Dictionary in Australia is such an example. I don't have mine nearby to say what symbol they currently use for this phoneme unfortunately. – hippietrail Dec 08 '11 at 10:25
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At first, you misquoted Wikipedia. What it actually says (the current edit) is that "in the north of the Netherlands and in North Central American usually diphthongized to [oʊ]." The same Wikipedia article has lots of examples when it "stands just by itself."

In British English, things are way more complicated. Although [əʊ] is the most common variant now, there are other variants, too; see part 8.10.4 in Gimson's Pronunciation of English (7th ed.).

And there are British dialects where [o:] is not diphthongized. After all, in Middle English it wasn't, either. It got diphthongized during the Great Vowel Shift. There are dialects where the glide is a schwa etc.

For some discussion based on the material of English dialects (the so called goat test), see Wells, J. C. 1981. Accents of English. Cambridge: CUP.

In The Linguistic atlas of England, you can find excellent maps; see, for example, the word "oak" (or loaf, toad etc.), which is not diphthongized in some dialects.

Alex B.
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  • Actually he didn't misquote it. If you look at the table at "English -> North Central American -> «row»", you'll see his quote in the last column. – Alenanno Dec 01 '11 at 18:35
  • didn't see it at first, thanks! – Alex B. Dec 01 '11 at 19:03
  • It got diphthongized during the Great Vowel Shift? What? Every resource I’ve seen discusses the raising of the GOAT vowel from historical [ɔː] to [oː] as an element of the Great Vowel Shift, while none discuss the diphthongization of that vowel in many accents. That’s a completely separate and much later development. – Graham H. Jul 22 '23 at 00:43
  • @GrahamH. Let me know how you interpret Minkova 2014 A historical phonology of English, pp. 264-265 – Alex B. Jul 22 '23 at 21:31
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The map of North American English Dialects has vast amount of collected data pertaining to your topic, with a visually appealing presentation.

Otavio Macedo
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Riccardo Angelillo
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