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INTRODUCTION TO THE VOWELS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE A  vowel  is one of the two principal classes of speech sound, the other being a  consonant . Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in  quantity (length) . They are usually  voiced , and are closely involved in  prosodic variation such as  tone ,  intonation  and  stress . Vowel sounds are produced with an open  vocal tract . The word  vowel  comes from the  Latin  word  vocalis , meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). Vowels are also called vociods. Phonetically, vowels are defined as speech segments which are produced with no obstruction in any part of the vocal tract; there is free flow of air from the lungs when vowel sounds are produced. On the other hand, phonemically, vowels are describe in terms of syllables (units of speech sound that can be produced within a single breath effort), that is, the sound that form the peak of the syllables. There are 20 vowel sounds in the English so

Phonology of  the English Language . Phonology is the study of the way sounds function in languages, including phonemes, syllable structure, stress, accent, intonation, and which sounds are distinctive units within a language. Every human language is made up of sounds, a study of these sounds and how they are patterned for meaningful communication is what is termed Phonology. The phonological system of the English Language also known as the sound system of the English Language is made of 44 phonemes(meaning distinguishing sounds). These phonemes-which are divided into vowels(20) and consonants (24)- form the elementary unit of spoken English. For a better understanding of what phonemes  stand for, I will like to make a distinction between these concepts used in phonetics(the study of human speech sounds), the concepts to be distinguished are; phonemes , allophones  and phones .  A phoneme is the smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of me