The vowels offer the greatest problem, so we will start there. The vowel system of English is relatively large. Latin had five vowels, hence the five vowel letters in our Roman alphabet; a modern form of Latin, Spanish, has also only five, Italian has seven, but English has at least twenty. Listen to the following English names and note that each has a different vowel sound:

1. Steve, Jim, Jen, Pat, Mark, John, George, Brook, Sue, Chuck, Bert, Jane, Joe, Di, Joy, Ian, Claire, NoorThat’s eighteen different vowel sounds already; then add to those, the two vowel sounds in  Howard, and the vowels at the beginning of Fiona and Louise.And so the relatively large size of the vowel system of English can begin to be appreciated. All these different vowel sounds can be used to distinguish -ordinary words too of course, such as

2. peat, pit, pet, pat, part, pot, port, put, putt, pert, pout . . .and thus they have a contrastive function. By virtue of this contrastive function, we can be sure that all these vowel sounds are distinct items, or units, in the phonology of English – that is, in English pronunciation as a system. And because they are distinct, linguists need to have a separate symbol for each of them.The phonetic description of the vowel sounds – that is, the way they are pronounced – helps us to classify them all into groups. There are three important groupings: the short vowels, the long vowels, and the weak vowels. Each will be dealt with in turn, beginning with the six short vowels.