Spelfabet

double consonants

We have 20 vowels in English but only 5 dedicated vowel letters, so we have to make our vowel letters work quite hard.

We often double vowel letters themselves to represent different sounds (e.g. sad v/s Saab, ten v/s teen, non v/s noon, Wifi v/s Wii) but we also represent different vowels by doubling the consonants that follow them.

It's quite hard to write a blog post that makes sense about this, without descending into a whole lot of linguistics jargon, so I have made a little video clip about this which I hope you find helpful: