English has become the primary language of the world. It is the language used for business, for air traffic control and of course the Internet. Quite an accomplishment for what began as a minor Germanic dialect in about the year 500.

This film is a history of the language itself. How did the language become so important? The Church fought the publishing of the Bible in English because this would allow anyone to read it rather than just the official priests.

Part of the reason for the spread of English has been the wealth of literature written in English. From Beowulf to Chaucer and of course the vulgar playwright William Shakespeare (who contributed 2,000 new words to the language).

The growth of English continues in spite of things like France making it illegal to use English words where good French words could be used. And English continues to change, the English of India for instance allows computer support desks to be located in Mumbai, but communication is not all that easy…

Not all speakers of English pronounce it in the same way. Even between the countries where English is the first language of the majority of population there are considerable differences, and we can distinguish between the pronunciation of 'British English', 'American English', 'Australian English', 'South African English', and so on.

One very interesting question that is often asked is: where do different dialects come from? Why are there dialects? The answer is that English, like all other languages in the world, is constantly changing, and that different changes take place in different parts of the country.

- "Received" is understood "accepted in the best society"
- is a prestige accent of an Englishman
- RP was at first typical for London area then it lost its local characteristics and was finally fixed as a ruling-class accent, often referred to as "Queen's English"
- It is also the accent taught at public schools
- A more broadly-based and accessible model accent for British English is represented as ВВС English**
- BBC is concidered to be the 'model' for English learners because it is easily understood

Many dictionaries represent pronunciation using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
From this you can find out about the sounds that make up a word and how it is stressed.
! It is useful to spend some time learning the IPA symbols so that you can make use of pronunciations shown in dictionaries.

This article is concerned with the notions of sound, phoneme and allophone.

What's the difference between the terms 'sound', 'phoneme' and 'allophone'?

When we talk about the sounds of a language, the term 'sound' can be rather ambiguous because it can be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, we can say that the sounds are different when they have different place of articulation (e.g: /t/ tree and /θ/ three), but at the same time we cannot say that when the sounds have the same place of articulation they are the same (e.g.: 'let me' and 'let them' ) because we can hear a vivid difference between /t/ pronunciation in the first case and /t/ pronunciation in the second case. That's why the linguists have introduced two separate termes to explain the notion of 'sound': phoneme and allophone.

Organs of speech or the vocal organs are a set of organs (lungs, larynx, pharynx, nasal cavity, mouth (or oral) cavity, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum or soft palate, uvula, vocal cords, tongue, lips, upper and lower jaws, teeth) used for the production of sounds through which people communicate (See Fig. 1).

Vowel oppositions 

/i:/ - /ɪ/                      /ɪ/  - /e/               /e/ - /æ/               /æ/ - /ʌ/       

sheep – ship            bin – Ben           pen – pan         cap – cup

leak – lick                tin – ten            men – man        hat – hut   

cheek – chick          pig – peg           send – sand       track – truck

Checking for the basic understanding of the common notions of Phonetics

1. Is a letter and a sound signify the same notion?

2. Can a letter signify several sounds?