Hi again and welcome back to Seattle Learning Academy's American English pronunciation podcast.

My name is Mandy, and this is our 145th episode.

When we launched our new Englishassembly.com Facebook page, the first question we asked

was if you were taught that the letter Y is a vowel.

When I was a child, we were taught that the vowels were A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.

Sometimes why?

What does that mean?

We know that, in English, letters represent sounds.

The letters, A, E, I, O, and U are used alone or in combination with each other to represent

vowel sounds. So, for the sake of simplicity, we call those letters vowels. Letters and sounds are

not the same thing, though.

So if we're talking about Y, then we really need to know if we're talking about the letter Y or the Y sound.

This is because the letter Y sometimes represents a vowel sound and sometimes represents a consonant sound.

The confusion occurs because the Y sound is generally considered to be a consonant sound.

This is for two reasons. First, consonant sounds are created with a more restricted vocal

tract than vowel sounds. During the Y sound, the tongue is held slightly closer to the tooth ridge

during the Y sound than for the vowel sound most similar to it,

the long E sound.

This can be heard, though it is very slight, in the minimal pair, yeast, east.

At the beginning of the word yeast, Y-E-A-S-T, my tongue is close enough to my tooth ridge for the airflow to be considered restricted.

My vocal tract is not as constricted in the beginning of the word east.

E-A-S-T.

...