Sound correspondences between English accents

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the English language.

These charts give a diaphoneme for each sound, followed by its realization in different dialects. The symbols for the diaphonemes are given in bold, followed by their most common phonetic values.

Abbreviations list

The following abbreviations are used in this article for regional varieties of English:

See Pronunciation respelling for English for phonetic transcriptions used in different dictionaries.

Consonants

Vowels

In the vowels charts, a separate phonetic value is given for each major dialect, alongside the words used to name their corresponding lexical sets. The diaphonemes for the lexical sets given here are based on RP and General American; they are not sufficient to express all of the distinctions found in other dialects, such as Australian English.

The groups are mostly defined such that no mergers of the sets in each group take place outside them. However, there are several mergers which are not described in the tables for practical reasons (see "Sets not merged here"). Note that in most cases, the first set in the group will never merge with the last set, similar to how the furthest points of a dialect continuum are not mutually intelligible.

to

comm to

to

to

to lett

to

Sets not merged here

In the tables above, the mergers of the , , , , and lexical sets are not included because of space limitations. These mergers are instead described below:

may merge with happ in Scottish English.
may completely merge with in Singaporean Standard English and Hong Kong English.
may merge with in various North England Englishes.
may merge with in General South African English.
may completely merge with , and in Cameroonian English.
may merge with in many varieties, including Standard Southern British English.