Phonetic symbols and spelling correspondences

Table 6.5 shows the sound/spelling correspondences for Australian English consonants and vowels. (All possible spellings are not given; these, however, should provide enough examples to help you pair sounds and English orthography.) We have included the symbols for the voiceless aspirated stops to illustrate that what speakers usually consider as one sound may phonetically be two.

The symbol given in table 6.5 are not sufficient to represent the pronunciation of words in all languages. The symbol [x], for example, is needed for the voiceless velar fricative in the German word Bach, and [R] for the French uvular fricative. English does not have rounded front vowels, but languages such as French and Swedish do. French rounded front vowels can be symbolised as follows :