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

My name is Amanda and this is our 216th episode.

After three episodes talking about some of the intricate details of pitch and intonation, today I'm going

to return to vowel sounds and specifically talk about the four cardinal vowels.

The last episode I did on vowels was episode 211, comparing the short A and short O.

The short A and short O happened to beat two of the four cardinal vowels.

Cardinal vowels are the four vowel sounds that are the most dramatic or extreme in the vowel system.

They are the vowel sounds with the most vocal tract movement,

and they can be used as reference points for the other vowel sounds.

The cardinal vowel system is not specific to English. In fact, it's meant to be used to compare all of the vowel sounds of all of the world's languages.

Since this is a podcast about English pronunciation,

specifically American English pronunciation, I'm going to explain the cardinal vowels from that

perspective. For you lucky podcast listeners, I also have a very special but limited offer

for you to get even more practice with the concepts I'll talk about

in this show. Listen at the end of this episode for details. Maybe you've seen the diagram that

shows the vowel sounds placed over a sort of square-like shape that's bigger on the top than it is on

the bottom. If not, go to the transcript

for this episode and take a look at what I'm talking about. I put an image there to help you see

what I'm describing. Just go to pronuncian.com spelled P-R-O-N-U-N-C-I-N and click Podcasts.

That vowels diagram can be very helpful for understanding what the tongue is doing when we create vowel sounds.

The four sounds in the corners of the vowels diagram are the four sounds we care about today.

Those sounds are the long E, O-O sound, short O and short A. I'll discuss them in that order.

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