open, use the lowered diacritic, a small T pointing down.high, use the raised diacritic, a small T pointing up.What’s the smallest noticeable change that you can make? You should feel the top surface of your tongue arching/cupping towards/away from your alveolar (gum) ridge behind your upper front teeth. Try lengthening the sound of your strut vowel, and then attempt to subtly shift its articulation around in the vowel space of your mouth-up, forwards, down, and back-in tiny increments. Are they the same, or different? (Note that for some speakers, the last two could be a different kind of contrast, if generally strut and foot match, but words like book, look, shook, took are pronounced with the goose vowel.) If they are the same, exploring strut with a different, contrasting vowel will be a new experience if strut and foot are different, you might occasionally experiment with applying your foot vowel to some of the word lists, phrases and sentences to see how that sounds and feels.Įxperiment on your own or with a classmate, friend, coach or teacher to identify how your strut vowel compares with others. Compare these minimal pairs: putt/put, cud/could, stud/stood, buck/book, luck/look. First, let’s determine whether your strut and foot sets are merged, or whether your accent has split them into two sets. Let’s figure out your personal way of saying strut. And of course, there are those pronunciations merged with foot, usually somewhere around, which follow the pronunciation you’ll find in that chapter ( The foot Lexical Set).

There is a more backed version (in spite of my comments above), with either a rounded or unrounded version. The Cockney version, which is more fronted,, might be thought of as an extreme of this type. A second group features some kind of central vowel, either a more mid-central version around, or a more open version around.

In describing the possibilities of strut, I will use narrow transcription to try to give a more detailed view of how strut might be pronounced.įor many varieties of English, strut is a bit more open, and a bit more forward than the back of the mouth, and so an advanced is more appropriate. However, the vowel quality of many varieties is quite different from the strict IPA definition of ʌ, which is an open-mid back unrounded vowel that is actually fairly rare. The strut lexical set is often transcribed with the /ʌ/ symbol, especially in broad transcriptions as found in dictionaries, and that symbol and the vowel of the strut lexical set are of known as wedge, caret, hat or hut (which is my personal preference!). In discussing pronunciations of strut, we’ll assume that we’re considering the split version that is differentiated from foot. Examples in stressed syllables include: such, above, does, flood, undone, enough examples of words with strut in unstressed syllables include: product, anyone, income, lifeblood, thermocouple. Many words within the strut set are spelled “u” before a consonant (C), or ‹uC› as in cut, bun, husk. in both stressed and unstressed syllables.☑️ Checked: requires a following consonant, and cannot exist on its own.In many varieties of English today, strut is a mid-open vowel ranging from central to back, with its most different pronunciations ranging from in Cockney, to a mid-open central vowel in parts of the US South, to a unrounded mid-close back vowel in parts of the North of England.

all strut words used to sound like foot words before the split!) In the North of England, where the split didn’t take place or may be incomplete, what appears to be a merger of foot/ strut is actually just the pre-existing condition (i.e. As such, strut words and foot words Splitinto two lexical sets in the 17th century. Historically, most of the words in strut evolved from the short /u/ vowel, though a small number of strut words (usually spelled ‹oo› or ‹ou›) evolved from /o/. Traditionally, strut is known as the “Short U” vowel. However, some accents have little difference, apart from stress, between strut and comm a, and in those cases, strut is typically considered the stressed form of comm a. The strut lexical set is a part of the Checked vowels group, and is capable of being in stressed syllables, and in some accents, in some unstressed syllables as well.

Great vowel shift and high tiders