Pronounce English Accurately

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Vowel 20: Diphthong /aʊ/

The last of the vowel sounds is another centring diphthong, /aʊ/.

To make /aʊ/, the mouth starts in a wide open position with the tongue far back and low – tonsil inspection moment. Then it moves towards the position for // and the lips are tightly rounded.

This is a very large movement, which in a very clear diphthong – it is usually very easy to make and to recognise and occurs in many languages.

The archetypal spellings for /aʊ/ are 'ow', as in 'Ow!' and 'now', and 'ou' as in 'ouch' and 'mouse'.

Examples are:

With 'ow': 'town', 'down', 'crowd', 'growl', 'sow' (female pig), 'prowess', 'towel' and 'vowel'

With 'ou': 'out', 'cloud', 'proud', 'noun', 'round', 'lounge', 'hound', 'fountain' and 'mountain'.

Of course, we can't be 100% sure of anything, so although we have 'sow' the female pig, we have the homograph 'sow' /səʊ/, a needle pulling thread, with the /əʊ/ diphthong from the previous lesson.

There are some 'ough' words: 'bough' of a tree, 'doughty', 'drought', and 'plough'.

'Au' pronounced /aʊ/ only occurs in foreign words, usually German: 'sauerkraut', 'umlaut' and 'Faust'.

'Ao' only occurs in foreign words as well, mostly of Spanish or Portuguese origin: 'Macao', 'Sao Paolo', 'Bilbao', and 'Maori'.

'Laos' can be either /laʊs/ or /ˈlɑːɒs/.

Practice sentences with /aʊ/:

Foul-mouthed louts prowled around my house until I growled at them.

Powerful showers will abound in the south.

That's the last of the phonemes, the contrastive sounds of English. In the next section I will look at reading the IPA correctly, building up from familiar monosyllables to unfamiliar longer words.