Hi, I’m Lori.
Welcome to Oxford Online English!
In this lesson, you can learn about English vowel sounds, and how to pronounce them.
This lesson will give you an overview.
You’ll see what vowel sounds exist in English, how to pronounce them, and common spelling patterns for each one.
First question: how many vowel sounds are there in English?
There are many answers to this question!
It depends how you define a single vowel sound, and whether you consider sounds which are very close to each other to be one sound or two sounds.
It also depends if you’re talking about British or American English, because there are some vowel sounds which exist in one but not in the other.
For this lesson, there are 21 vowel sounds: eight short vowel sounds, five long vowel sounds, and eight diphthongs.
