Long and Short Vowel sounds

This is especially useful when applying to certain phonetic spelling rules. Contrary to many European beliefs, the English language does follow its own sets of phonetic rules where we pronounce what we see written. However, these rules differ from most other latin based languages.

One of these rules looks at the order of consonants and vowels in a word to confirm the use of a long or short vowel.

There are 5 vowels in the English language and each vowel has a long and a short sound.

A Short Vowel is used when the word has a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) structure. ie: rat /rat/; sit /sIt/; not/not/; cut /c^t/

A Long Vowel is used when the word has a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel (CVCV) structure. ie: rate /reit/; site /sait/; note /nout/; cute /ciut/

The magic 'e' at the end of the word changes the previous vowel to a long sound.

As seen in the video clip above, there are many other ways of changing vowel sounds from short to long.

Vowels	Short	Long
a	/a/	/ei/
e	/e/	/ii/
i	/I/	/ai/
o	/o/	/ou/
u	/^/	/iu/

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