ALPHABET

You probably think that English is written with 26 letters.

Well, it is and it isn’t. The English alphabet is made up of 26 letters, but the English language makes use of more than 40 speech sounds. As a result, the 26 letters must be used in various combinations to represent the extra sounds.

Different authorities give different totals for the
spoken sounds of English. The instructions on this site number the sounds of English at 46.

My main authority is The Writing Road to Reading by Romalda Spalding. I have altered some of the phonogram examples to account for changes that have occurred in American pronunciation since the book was first published.

The single letters of the alphabet

b,d,h,j,k,l,m,n,p,r,t,v,w,z

f, g, s, x

c, q(u), y

a, e, i, o, u

The “rest of the alphabet”

/ow/, /oi/, /aw/, /ar/, /or/

5
spellings of /er/

sh, wh, ch, th, ng, si