Spelfabet

Diphthongs

Why do kids often count an extra syllable in words like ‘nightingale’, ‘crocodile’, ‘pigeonhole’, ‘waterfowl’, ‘hydrofoil’, ‘silverware’ and ‘puppeteer’?

Some vowel sounds shift from one place in the mouth to another, including the final vowels in the above words. They’re called diphthongs (pronounced ‘diff-thong’, from the Greek prefix di meaning “two” and phthongos meaning “sound, voice”*). When you say words containing diphthongs slowly and think about what your mouth is doing, it’s easy to understand why they’re sometimes counted as two vowels.

Australian English diphthongs are /ae/ as in ‘day’, /ie/ as in ‘my’, /oe/ as in ‘no’, /ou/ as in ‘out’, /oi/ as in ‘boy’, /air/ as in ‘care’ and /ear/ as in ‘dear’. To most Americans** and others who pronounce word-final /r/ (have a rhotic accent), /air/ and /ear/ aren’t diphthongs, they’re just a vowel followed by a consonant.

There’s actually only one vowel sound in /ue/ as in ‘use’, because the first sound of this combination is /y/ as in ‘yes’, a consonant (officially, though it sounds more like the vowel /ee/). However, /ue/ is represented by a single letter in so many words e.g. ‘unit’, ‘human’ and ‘unicorn’ (more here) that for spelling purposes it’s easier to treat it as a single sound, except in ‘you’, ‘youth’, and the Aussie second person plural pronoun ‘youse’.

Australian and similar accents without word-final /r/ also have triphthongs, three vowels in a row, because the final letter ‘r’ is pronounced as an unstressed vowel (schwa):

OK, the vowel in ‘tour’ is only a diphthong, not a triphthong, but it’s so rare in Australian English that it’s not worth counting/teaching as a separate sound, and I wasn’t sure where else to put it.

Thinking too much about triphthongs can get us into a weirdly three-legged, dialect-dependent (are ‘door’ and ‘dour’ homophones to you?) swamp, where rhyming words with and without suffixes can have very different spellings (fire and higher, sour and shower, cure and fewer, doer and tour) and everyone starts getting lost in the linguistic seaweeds. Best to treat the final, unstressed vowel represented by letter ‘r’ in words like ‘fire’, ‘sour’, ‘pure’ and ‘tour’ as a separate vowel, but pronounce it as /r/ in your spelling voice, like most Americans, and everyone in the Olden Days.

Yes, I know Aussies are the only ones who use the word ‘thong’ to mean footwear, not underwear. If you want to make a lingerie-based version of the above graphics, that’s entirely up to you.

Thanks to Nell whose question on this topic got me thinking, and Aussie National Treasure Tim Winton, whose mesmerising documentary series about Ningaloo/Nyinggulu (currently free on iView, don’t miss it) got my subconscious into a beachy frame of mind.

_{* Greek phth, pronounced /fth/, is also found in ‘diphtheria’, ‘naphthalene’ and ‘phthalate’, so would everyone please stop putting a /p/ sound in ‘diphtheria’? A dipthong is not a Thing!}

_{** Except the ones who park their cars in Harvard yard.}