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| The cot–caught merger |
The cot–caught merger
/ɔ/ and /ɑ/ are back vowels, where the tongue is low. Before we learn how to pronounce /ɔ/ and /ɑ/, we need to know this fact: in standard American English, many words that used to be pronounced with /ɔ/ are pronounced with /ɑ/. This phenomenon is called the cot–caught merger.
Areas in the US where there is no-merger, ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ are pronounced as /kɑt/ and /kɔt/. But in standard American English, they sound the same, /kɑt/. Due to the merger, in standard American English, these words are homophones:
Homophones due to /ɔ/ and /ɑ/ merger
cot - caught
collar - caller
don (put clothes on) - Don (nickname of Donald) - dawn
knotty - naughty
not - naught
rot - wrought
stock - stalk
tot (very young child) - taught
nod- gnawed
Pronunciation of /ɔ/
Due to the cot-caught merger, words with the pure phoneme /ɔ/ do not exist. Instead, words with the /ɔ/ sound exist as an r-colored vowel /ɔr/ as in ‘Florida’ and ‘orange.’ The /ɔ/ sound also occurs as a diphthong /ɔɪ/, as in “boy” and “noise.”. Words with /ɔr/ can be challenging if we do not know how to pronounce the /ɔ/ sound: e.g., war, warm, and order. So it is important to know how to pronounce /ɔ/.
/ɔ/ is a medium-low back vowel. It is also a round vowel, meaning that the lips are rounded when saying /ɔ/. To know how to say /ɔ/, it is useful to compare it with sounds that share some similar mechanics. Compared with another round vowel /u/, the lips are not pushed out as much as /u/ since the tongue for /ɔ/ has to be low. To make the tongue low, mechanically speaking, the jaw has to drop. To know how much the jaw has to drop, compare /ɔ/ with another round vowel /o/. /o/ is a mid-high vowel, and /ɔ/ is a mid-low vowel. By the way, /o/, as a pure phoneme, occurs in Korean and French, but not in standard American English, where it occurs only as a diphthong sound, /oʊ/. Since /o/ is a mid-high vowel, the jaw does not drop, but /ɔ/ is a mid-low vowel so the jaw has to drop significantly. /ɔ/ is not an /ɔ/ without the jaw dropping.
/ɔr/ words
These are words with /ɔr/ sound:
with “or”:
boring, corner, foreign, forest, forty, historical, majority, moral, north, orange, origin, priority, short, story, shorter, reporter, supporter, order, border, recorder, core, pore, or, Thor
with “ar”:
quarter, war, warrier, warm, swarm
with “oor”:
door, floor, poor
with “oar”
soar, roar, oar
with “ore” :
ore, swore, wore, before, more
with “our”:
four, pour (poor, pour and pore are homophones)
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| /ɔr/ homophones |
/ɑ/ words
/ɑ/ should be a pretty straightforward sound for non-native speakers since the sound is common in all languages. It is an unrounded, low back vowel sound. The sound is called the short O sound by American teachers since the sound is commonly found in letter O. The letter A can sometimes make a short 'o' sound too though. These are words with the pronunciation of /ɑ/
with "a":
calm, father, wasp, watch, wash, what, walk, swallow, swap
with "o":
body, bother, clock, cost, doctor, follow, got, holiday, hot, involve, job, lot, model, not, possible, probably, problem, shop, stop, top, borrow, sorry, tomorrow
R-colored /ɑr/ words
with “ar”
arm, army, art, article, artist, bar, car, card, carpet, charge, charm, chart, dark, department, far, farm, garden, guard, guitar, hard, harm, large, march, mark, market, park, part, partner, party, regard, remark, sharp, smart, star, start, target
with “ear,” and “uar”:
heart, guard
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