Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about spoken and written English, and so deals with the sounds of speech as well as the letters of the alphabet. The distinctive sounds of a particular language, or more precisely of a particular variety of a language, are known as phonemes, and phonemes are conventionally signalled by being enclosed in diagonal brackets. The sound of each phoneme is always clearly explained or illustrated by placing it in a familiar context. The important thing to remember is that when you see diagonal brackets, the symbols inside represent sounds and not letters. Hence the (written) word cool would be transcribed by the sequence of phonemes /kul/.