A (phoneme)

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For a note on how AWE organizes its group of articles on vowels, basically by aspects of sound and of writing, see category:vowels.

Various symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet can be described as 'a' or 'a-like'. This page lists them, as they are used in the phonemic description of RP English. Each symbol links to a separate page listing the sounds which it can represent.

There is another page at A (grapheme) which deals with the way the written sign A (or a, or æ‘) is used in writing English in the Roman alphabet, on its own or as part of a digraph. A (grapheme) represents a wide variety of sounds - not all of them represented by 'a-like' symbols in the IPA.

  • Monophthongs
    • /æ/, as in 'cat', 'man', 'back' and North of England and American accents' realization of 'glass' and 'bath'.
    • /a/, as in (foreign) patte (French), Mann (German).
    • /ɑː/, as in RP pronunciation of 'father', 'glass' and 'bath'.
    • /É’/, as in 'got', 'watch' and 'want'.
    • /ɔː/, as in 'all', 'caught' and 'ought'.
  • Diphthongs
    • /aɪ/, as in 'light', 'white' and 'why'.
    • /aÊŠ/, as in 'how' and 'out'

There is also the name of the letter 'A', transcribed with the 'e- like' /eɪ/, which is also used in 'say' /seɪ/ and similar syllables.

Much of the information on this page has been taken from McArthur and Bell (2004).