Let's try to learn about Tense and Lax vowels in this Spoken English Tutorial. Understanding them is crucial to us if we want to succeed in getting a perfect English.
In this Spoken English Tutorial the topic of vowels will be covered as I think that they are extremely important in our pursuit of perfecting English speaking skills. Learn the vowels correctly and you will significantly reduce your problems spelling English words.
Overview of vowel sounds
To say it bluntly, the letters in English alphabet is not the same as the symbols in phonetics alphabet. Yes there are sounds that are similar in appearance and in the sound the produce with the letters of the alphabet (a,o,i,e …) , but there are more sounds that do not appear in standard alphabet – the sound schwa and short I ,for example . In certain books and sources you might encounter different ways and amounts of sounds, but that’s ok – they are probably all right, because some sounds have a linguistics difference, but their pronunciation are so similar that some books decided to blend them into one symbol for the sake of expediting language learning.
Basically, sounds are the topic of phonetics and they are pertinent not only to English language. The sound schwa might be encountered in many other languages, not only English one, even the languages that have a completely different standard alphabet.
Lax and Tense – what do they mean.
If you are careful you will notice that some sounds in English are longer than other sounds. For example, to say the pronoun ‘I’ you need twice as much time as you need to pronounce the vowel sound in ‘pit’. This brings us to an idea of categorizing those sounds into two groups – short and long sounds.
Another way of grouping the sounds would be dividing them into lax and tense vowels. Basically, they correspond to short and long vowels each, but the terminology is more useful in our study of American English pronunciation.
You might have encountered other ways of grouping the sounds (for example, “checked” and “free” vowels), but we won’t touch them in this article.
Tell me about the Tense vowels, tell me about the lax vowels.
Remember that in American English there are 8 tense vowels and 6 lax vowels (totaling in 14 vowels). First characteristics that distinguishes them is the fact that you need to pronounce the first group for a greater duration of time compared to the latter group.
Another key characteristic is that tense vowels require a lot of mouth movement from your part. You can’t say the pronoun ‘I’ in a lazy manner – you have to drop your jaw and mouth to a quite noticeable extent, otherwise you will produce a wrong sound.
The lax vowels are a complete opposite to tense vowels in a sense that they do not require you to move your lips, jaw or tongue too much. Try to say the vowels in ‘the’, ‘bit’ and you will notice that it is pretty easy to say them with minimal effort from your mouth.
Learn these vowels and use them
If you remember that there only 14 vowels in American English and you memorize how to pronounce the tense and lax vowels you will do yourself a great favor. Sometimes you hear a non-native produce a sound that was supposed to sound English, but due to lack of practice they come off wrong. If you memorize the sounds in American English – that problem won’t arise anymore. You will know what sounds truly exist and will be able to use them correctly.
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