PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Segmental Aspects

British English diphthongs: eɪ aɪ ͻɪ əʊ aʊ ɪə eə ʊə

There are eight diphthongs in British English. According to the elements they consist of, they are either defined as closing /eɪ aɪ ͻɪ əʊ aʊ/ or centring /ɪə eə ʊə/. This classification takes into consideration the direction of movement of the tongue. When articulating centring diphthongs, the tongue makes the movement toward the central, neutral position in the oral cavity – to the schwa /ə/. For closing diphthongs, the tongue moves upwards from a lower position or from a more open to a more-close vowel defined as near-high: /ɪ/ or /ʊ/ (Bázlik, Miškovičová, 2012).

In British English, diphthongs can be either falling or rising, but the general tendency is to pronounce them as falling. This means that their first components are more prominent than the second ones, hence first segments are pronounced with a higher degree of stress. “In English, most of the prominence is concentrated on the first element (approx. 2/3), the second element (approx. 1/3) being reduced in a decrescendo way (the sound becomes less loud as the glide progresses” (Plavka, 1997, p. 15) or, as Roach says, “the first part is much longer and stronger than the second part, as in most of the diphthong aɪ, e.g. eye /aɪ/” (Roach, 1996, p. 20).

Prominence covers four basic aspects: quality, quantity, pitch of voice and loudness. The result of prominence is the word stress. A higher degree of prominence placed on the first segment (in falling diphthongs) can cause its lengthening. As for quality of vowels, there is also a difference in classifying them into strong and weak in English. Weak vowels rarely occur in stressed syllables. These are short schwa /ə/, short or long i, /ɪ i i:/, and short or long u, /ʊ u:/. The rest of the English vowels /Ʌ e ɒ æ ɑ: ͻ: ɜ:/ are strong, so they mainly form syllable nuclei of English stressed syllables. From the point of view of the other phenomenon – quantity – one of the segments in diphthongs is often prolonged. In English, it is generally the first one, because the English diphthongs are pronounced as falling. In transcription, length mark /:/ is never written after the first segment, although it is longer and louder, e.g. my /maɪ/.

British English diphthongs are placed on the diagram as shown in the following figure. The arrows show the direction of the tongue as it glides from the position where the first segment is articulated to the second one: