By Olga Smith
Students who take elocution lessons often find English diphthongs quite difficult to pronounce.
A diphthong is a voiced sound consisting of two vowel sounds glided together. There are eight diphthongs in English:
[ɪə] – hear – [hɪə]
[eɪ] – pay – [peɪ]
[eə] – pair – [peə]
[aɪ] – pie – [paɪ]
[aʊ] – how – [haʊ]
[əʊ] – boat – [bəʊt]
[ɔɪ] – boy – [bɔɪ]
[ʊə] – sewer – [sʊə]
The most common mistakes that students make pronouncing diphthong are:
1. They shorten them and we hear only one vowel and the second vowel is dropped, or they make the first vowel longer than the second one so that we can hardly hear it.
2. Diphthong [ɪə] – hear – [hɪə], [eə] – pair – [peə], and [ʊə] – sewer – [sʊə] have "r" is spelling and in British English, you should not pronounce it.
3. Diphthong [əʊ] – boat – [bəʊt] does not exist in other languages and most students find it hard to master.
To address these issues we recommend that you:
1. Make sure that we hear both vowels of it and they have equal length. The first part of the diphthong is slightly stressed.
2. You can train yourself to not pronounce "r" in spelling by controlling your tongue and not lifting it.
3. It might take you a little longer to master diphthong [əʊ] – boat – [bəʊt]. When I started to work on it I thought I will never be able to pronounce it correctly. Then, my tutor, Linda James explained that if I break it into two parts it will be easier. The first vowel is [ə] as in "the" and the second vowel is [ʊ] as in "book", and we glide from the first vowel into the second making one complete sound [] as in "boat".
We believe that the best way to achieve good results is through practice. You can do it with the help of apps, books, and video courses in the series Get Rid of your Accent which contains 10% of theory and of 90% practice from classic elocution lessons.