A,E,I,O,U are not 5 vowels?

Hello Everyone!

Today I am going to share a very important piece of information about a,e,i,o,u.

You might have been taught that there are 5 vowels in English a,e,i,o,u.

 If ‘u’ had been a vowel, we would have used an before university, right? But that’s not the case here. We cannot declare a,e i,o,u as only five vowels in English. Now, the question arises, if there not only 5 vowels,how many vowels are there in English? I will discuss the answer here as well as I’ll explain here whether A,E,I,O,U are vowels or vowel letters?

There is much more to know about vowels.

First of all you know what is vowel and what are vowel letters?

            Vowel Letters 

Letters representing a speech sound made with the vocal tract open, are called vowel letters,specifically the letters A, E, I, O, U.

A,E,I,O,U are the vowel letters which represent all the vowel sounds. In this way there are not only 5 vowel sounds in English. There are 20 vowel sounds in total which we get from these 5 vowel letters a,e, i, o, u.

For example letter ‘a’ represent various vowel sounds in the following words below.

Bat /æ /

Car /a:/

Date /ei/

Above  /ə/

Whereas letter ‘u’ represents different sound in following  examples.

Gun /ʌ/
Here, letter ‘u’ represents vowel sound  /ʌ/
but in
University letter ‘u’ represents ‘y’ sound as consonant.
We have to carefully observe all the vowel sounds represented by these vowel letters.

20 vowels which we get from 5 vowel letters a,e,i,o,u, are further divided in two parts
1.Monophthongs (12).
2.Diphthongs (8).
12 monophthongs and 8 diphthongs are 20 vowel sounds.

Click here to read my previous post about Monophthongs or pure vowels in detail with examples.

Click here to read about Diphthongs or impure vowels in detail with examples.

To understand this post in a better way, watch these videos below.