How to Read a Book and Why

Syllables

Vowels can be monophthongs, diphthongs or triphthongs. To understand these terms you must first understand what a syllable is, and the best way to explain that is with an example.

Say each of these words to yourself:

• 
  Mouse (1 syllable)
  
• 
  Rabbit (2 syllables)
  
• 
  Kangaroo (3 syllables)
  
• 
  Barracuda (4 syllables)
  
• 
  Hippopotamus (5 syllables)
  

As you can hear, a syllable is a 'unit of pronunciation'. If we say that a word has one syllable or two syllables, that says something about the rhythmic character of the word.

Any word must have at least one syllable; even the word ‘a’ has one syllable. A word has two syllables when there are two vowel sounds divided by a consonant sound, or, to put it another way, two vowel sounds connected by a consonant sound. A word has three syllables when there are three vowel sounds divided/connected by two consonant sounds. And so on.

If we say that a word has one syllable or two syllables, that says something about the rhythmic character of the word.

Let’s take the word ‘occur’ as an example. Here we have two vowels – ə and əː – which are divided/connected by the consonant sound, k, making əkəː. This is a two-syllable word. If we look again at the word ‘rabbit’, we see the same structure. There are two vowel sounds in this word: æ and ɪ. Between these two vowel sounds is a consonant sound, b, making æbɪ. ‘Rabbit’ is a two-syllable word because it contains two vowel sounds with a consonant sound between them. (There are two other consonant sounds in ‘rabbit’ – r at the beginning of the first syllable, and t at the end of the second syllable – but these sounds do not affect the syllabic structure of the word.)