User:Teacher Judy/English Phonetic Alphabet

English Phonetic Alphabet
The English Phonetic Alphabet (EPA) is a modernized system of phonetic symbols that represents the forty sounds of spoken English using the Latin alphabet in conjuction with characters found on standard computer keyboards. The EPA is used by foreign language students, teachers in colleges and universities, and in immigrant settlement programs across Canada, the United States, China, Japan, India, Europe and Australia.

The EPA is designed to visually support learners' ability to speak English with a logical, familiar set of symbols that can be learned quickly and used instantly.

EPA is written by enclosing Latin letters in slash brackets to indicate makes the sound. For example, the letter b in slash brackets represents the sound /b/ as in boy.

The alphabet is composed of two types of sounds, consonant or stopped sounds and vowel or elastic sounds. There are 24 consonant and 16 vowel sounds for a total of 40 individual sounds in English.

Consonants
The 24 EPA consonant sounds are represented by regular Latin letters.

- 18 consonant sounds are represented by single symbols:

/b/-boy, /d/-dog, /f/-five, /g/-goat, /h/-house, /j/-July, /k/-king, /l/-lemon, /m/-money, /n/-never, /p/-people, /r/-red, /s/-summer, /t/-time, /v/-visa, /w/-woman, /y/-yellow, /z/-zebra - 6 consonant sounds are represented by pairs of symbols:

/CH/-church, /SH/-shoe, /TH/-think, /th/-the, /ng/-ring, /Zh/-genre Note: There is no c, q or x in the phonetic alphabet because all the sounds they make are represented by other letters.

Vowels
The Latin vowels a, e, i, o, and u used in written English do not adequately represent the 16 vowel sounds in spoken English. EPA uses a color-coded vowel system based on the names of sixteen colors to eliminate the student's dependence on spelling for accurate pronunciation. For example, rain, great, hey, eight and name contain the long a sound found in the word gray. Regardless of spelling, students remember those words as gray words. Cat, laugh and plaid are black words etc.

- 16 EPA vowel sounds

/Ay/-gray, /a/-black, /Ey/-green, /e/-red, /Iy/-white, /i/-pink, /Ow/-yellow, /o/-olive, /Uw/-blue, /u/-mustard, /^/-wood, /Oy/-turquoise, /Aw/-brown, /Er/-purple, /Ar/-charcoal, /Or/-orange

English is a stress-based language and there is one and only one most important syllable in every word, therefore each English word is one and only one color. Nation is gray, creation is gray, pronunciation is also gray. There are over one million words in the English language and each word is only one of the 16 EPA colors. Beginner to advanced level learners find EPA a useful pronunciation tool.