The following charts concentrate on the sounds of Standard American English. These charts are done in the standard IPA. If you are using a text like the Language Files, which uses the American Phonetic Alphabet, be aware of the following conversions:
= 
= 
= 
= 
= 
= 
The chart below contains example words to help illustrate what the different IPA symbols represent. To the right of each IPA symbol are words which contain the vowel represented by the symbol.
| . | Front |
Central
|
Back | |||
| High |  |
beet, peak | .... | .. |  |
boot, due |
 |
bit, pick | .. | .. |  |
book, hood | |
| Mid |  |
bait, take |  |
of, the |  |
boat, poke |
 |
bet, peck |  |
but, puck |  |
caught, dawn | |
| Low |  |
bat, pack | .... | .. |  |
hot, don |
One of the central vowels, , is called schwa. It sounds nearly indistinguishable from the other central vowel, (called caret), but linguists often use both. Schwa is used to represent unstressed vowels, like those in the and of, as well as any like the second vowel of the word dated. Caret, however, is always used to represent a vowel that has some amount of stress.
Not all dialects of English maintain a distinction between the lax mid-back vowel and the low vowel . The English of the British Isles and of the northeast United States (icluding New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New England, and Michigan) retains both vowels. The two vowels are 'merged' in Mid-western, western, and southern American English, as well as in Canadian English. These 'merging' dialects do not have ; as a result, words like caught and dawn are pronounced with .
No discussion of English vowels is complete unless it includes diphthongs. A diphthong is a complex vowel, made of two components; a diphthong begins as one vowel and finishes as another. Usually, the two components can be referred to as a nucleus and an off-glide. For example, the diphthong 
, found in words like ride, is composed of (the nucleus) and 
(the off-glide).
Standard English has three "phonemic" diphthongs: , as in ride and why, 
, as in loud and how, and 
, as in boy and moist. We can call these phonemes because they are distinct from the vowels and .
Important note: there are several ways of transcribing diphthongs. Some phoneticians and linguists use 
instead of ; and 
instead of .
Many dialects of English (including standard American and British RP) have extra diphthongs that aren't phonemic. In these dialects, all tense vowels are actually diphthongs. Thus, words like beet or peak are better transcribed with 
; this diphthong is not phonemic since it isn't distinct from . That is, no dialect has two words that differ only by those vowels; every dialect has either the diphthong or the monophthong , but not both.
The chart below shows words that contain these non-phonemic diphthongs.
| . | Front | Back | ||
| High | |
beet, peak |  |
boot, due |
| Mid |
 or  |
bait, take |
 or  |
boat, poke |
© 2001 The Language Samples Project