This webpage aims to help teachers of English to start using transcription and to provide a few exercises which can also be used in class.
First of all, if you haven’t installed the phonetic fonts yet, go to the download page.
Here we are showing the phonemes of Standard Southern British English (SSBE). British English has 44 phonemes – 20 vowels and 24 consonants. The following picture shows all the phonemes, together with example words. (The symbols in the upper right corner represent marks for stress and intonation.)
Note: the diphthong /eə/ is today mostly pronounced as a monophthong, [ɛː].
All English phonemes are found directly on the keyboard and the transcription is quite transparent; in the table below we give the keys as they apply on the Czech keyboard.
| Phoneme | Transcription |
| iː | i |
| ɪ | I |
| e | e |
| ɛː | E |
| æ | / |
| ʌ | V |
| ɑː | A |
| ɒ | Q |
| ɔː | O |
| ʊ | U |
| uː | u |
| ə | ! |
| ɜː | š |
| Phoneme | Transcription |
| p | p |
| b | b |
| t | t |
| d | d |
| k | k |
| ɡ | g |
| f | f |
| v | v |
| θ | T |
| ð | D |
| s | s |
| z | z |
| ʃ | S |
| ʒ | Z |
| h | h |
| ʧ | either combination of two symbols, tʃ, or using the code &# followed by 679; |
| ʤ | either combination of two symbols, dʒ, or using the code &# followed by 676; |
| m | m |
| n | n |
| ŋ | N |
| r | r |
| l | l |
| j | j |
| w | w |
| Symbol | Transcription |
| ˈ | 2 (stress) |
| ː | “ or : (length mark; inverted commas on Czech keyboard, colon on English keyboard) |
| n̩ | ´ (syllabicity; as if writing a comma above „o“ in Czech) |
CUBE – a powerful pronunciation dictionary (instruction video here)
