English phonology

English phonology is the sound system shared by varieties of English, including their phonemes, syllable structures, stress patterns, and rules governing sound combinations.

Phoneme: A contrastive sound unit that can distinguish words in a language. English phonology studies how contrastive sound units distinguish words such as pin and bin.
English consonant phonemes: The consonant sound categories used to distinguish words in English varieties. Their contrasts and distribution form a central part of English phonological description.
Received Pronunciation: A prestige accent of English associated historically with southern England and public institutions. Its sound system offers a familiar reference point, though it is not representative of all English varieties.
Old English phonology: The sound system of Old English, the earliest recorded stage of the English language. Its sound patterns provide a historical baseline for changes that shaped modern English.
Allophone: A context-dependent pronunciation variant of a phoneme that does not change word meaning. English phonemes can have different pronunciations, as the aspirated and unaspirated forms of /p/ illustrate.
English vowel system: The vowel phonemes and contrasts found in a variety of English. Vowel inventories vary substantially across English accents and shape many lexical contrasts.
General American English: A broad label for several widely shared pronunciation and usage features of United States English. Compared with Received Pronunciation, it differs in features such as rhoticity and some vowel patterns.
Great Vowel Shift: A series of major long-vowel changes in English between the late medieval and early modern periods. It helps explain why modern English vowel pronunciation often diverges from spelling.
Distinctive feature: A phonetic property, such as voicing or place of articulation, used to describe sound contrasts and patterns. Features capture shared properties behind English contrasts and sound changes.
English phonotactics: The constraints governing which sound sequences can occur in English syllables and words. English permits some consonant clusters while excluding others, such as initial /ŋ/.

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