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Has anyone found the vowel in "-ang" and "-ank" words transcribed differently than /æ/? The sound, to my ear, is not the same as the /æ/ sound in words like "ran." I hear the vowel as closer to /eI/ or somewhere in between /eI/ and /æ/.

For reference, listen to the pronunciation of "ran".

And the pronunciation of "rang".

Laurel
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Jane
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    Depends on who's speaking. When I click on your links, I get both an American and a British pronunciation. To me, the American sounds like she's saying rayng while the Brit is saying rang. – Peter Shor Feb 04 '17 at 18:03
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    Dictionaries normally transcribe phonemes. There’s no doubt that the vowel is phonemically an /a/; sang and (gin)seng have clearly different vowels, for instance. But phonemes have allophones, and those aren’t generally included in dictionary transcriptions. The phoneme /a/, for example, has a specific allophone before velars, especially before the velar nasal /ŋ/. In AmE, it frequently gets diphthongised more there than elsewhere; in BrE, it is usually less centralised there. So a purely phonetic transcription would show a difference; but a phonemic one needn’t. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 04 '17 at 18:08
  • Hi Peter, I'm glad you commented as I just found your answer on a different post... You said, "In many speakers in the Midwest and West (particularly the Upper Midwest and the Pacific Northwest), the vowel /æ/ in sag, slag, bag, tag, and so on, is diphthongized1. It can be the same as the /eɪ/ in vague, or it can be pronounced similarly to the way Australians pronounce mate /mæɪt/. See this dialect blog entry.

    1It is also diphthongized in sang, hang, rank, blank, and so on. But I believe that this pronunciation is so widespread that most Americans don't notice it."

     – Jane Feb 04 '17 at 18:08
  • Sorry for the formatting issues there. – Jane Feb 04 '17 at 18:10
  • I guess I was wondering why, when it sounds so much closer to /eI/, the dictionaries wouldn't transcribe it as /eI/, knowing that there may be deviation toward /ae/. – Jane Feb 04 '17 at 18:12
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    Because that deviation is not universal. It only applies to some dialects and speakers. Occam’s Razor: transcribe the simplest phoneme that will fit. There are no minimal pairs between /aŋ/ and /eɪŋ/ in English, so they could have chosen either; /a/ is just a more basic phoneme, since it’s not in itself a diphthong. In diphthongising dialects, the change is completely automatic, so it can be easily applied; in non-diphthongising dialects, no change is necessary. If they’d chosen /eɪ/, it would just have been reversed. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 04 '17 at 18:18
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    @JanusBahsJacquet That comment seems to be a reasonable official answer (and Jane should probably update her question to clarify that it is partly an issue of dictionary writing too. – Mitch Feb 04 '17 at 18:28
  • Spin-off question... Which dialects don't add a glide to make the sound closer to /eɪ/? Would we all agree that it is fairly "standard" to use the glide? – Jane Feb 04 '17 at 18:37
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    The palatal glide inserted after [æ] and before velar nasal is not purely phonetic, because it does not happen before a derived velar nasal, only before phonemic velar nasal. Compare "bankings" with "Ban kings!", where in the latter there is often an optional regressive assimilation of /n/ in place of articulation to the following velar /k/. Yet this secondary velar nasal does not cause insertion of a preceding glide (at least, not usually). – Greg Lee Feb 04 '17 at 19:21
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    @JanusBahsJacquet Oh yay, I’m glad you chimed in about there being no minimal pairs for /æŋ/ and /eɪŋ/. Dictionary pronunciations never capture the allophonic range realized in our pre-nasal vowels, especially lax ones, due variously to nasalization, assimilation, or neutralization. Spelling conventions for native English words are telling: witness how no native words are spelled with -enk or -eng (for /g/ not /dʒ/) finally or under stress, so we have only sang, thank, tank, anger, banker, never any -en- versions of those. – tchrist Feb 04 '17 at 19:26
  • @tchrist: we have length and strength, which are not generally pronounced with the vowel of rang. – Peter Shor Feb 04 '17 at 19:31
  • @PeterShor True, and those were near the top of my list of words to look at, which I ran out of room for: ginseng, nasi goreng, orangutang, orange, strength, length, thing, think thank thunk, ink, rink, ring rang rung, sing sang sung, sink sank sunk, rank, oink, bank, bench, ninja, benji, banjo, anger, bronco, binge, revenge, range, henge, enjoy, ranger, wrench, engine, rancor, ranker, inbred, enforcer, inputted, impossible, empire, umpire, enfeeble, infamous, enfeoff, infallible, ember, amber, anguish, extinguish, English. – tchrist Feb 04 '17 at 19:36
  • @tchrist There were more than I'd expected in the OED, but ginseng was the only one not marked obsolete (and the only one I'd ever heard of). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 04 '17 at 19:54
  • @GregLee Excellent point. The reverse (if you can call it that) is also true: /eɪ/ before derived velar nasals is usually pronounced differently from /a/ before /ŋ/ as well, as in manky vs main key. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 04 '17 at 19:56
  • @JanusBahsJacquet I did look up a bunch of those from the OED, and I reached the conclusion that we'd long ago settled on NOT spelling things that way, whatever the reason. – tchrist Feb 04 '17 at 19:58
  • @Jane Going through stereotypical dialects in my head, I'd say most varieties of British, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and Australian do not diphthongise. American dialects do generally diphthongise, and I can't quite figure out if New Zealand and South African dialects do or not because their vowels are weird to begin with. In general, though, I'd associate it with American dialects—the more Southern the dialect, the stronger the diphthongisation. There may be some actual comparative studies which go into more detail, but I'm not aware of it if there are. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 04 '17 at 20:03
  • Closely related: http://english.stackexchange.com/q/170759 – tchrist Feb 04 '17 at 23:59

2 Answers2

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As other people have mentioned in the comments, the vowel in words like "rang" and "rank" is traditionally transcribed with the symbol /æ/, called "ash," which corresponds to the vowel phoneme in the word "ash" in a standard modern English accent. This is the transcription you will see in dictionaries. It will likely to continue to be used because it is easy to derive most of the regional variants from this phonemic representation.

However, there are many American English accents (my own among them) where the vowel phone in the words "rang/rank" sounds significantly different from the vowel phone in the word "ash". The phoneme /æ/ is especially prone to being "tensed" before nasals and voiced velar sounds, and /ŋ/ is both.

  • For some speakers, /æ/ is raised before any nasal to something like [ẽə̯̃]. I think this is about how I pronounce the vowel in "rang/rank" (to me, it seems more or less the same as the vowel in "ran" or "ram," and about the same in quality as the sound in "rare" or "rail"). Actually, if I pronounce "rang" slowly I can hear that the vowel in "rang" ends on a higher quality than the vowel in "ram," but I still don't mentally recognize my "rang" vowel as a closing diphthong.

  • For other speakers, the following velar nasal causes a high off-glide that is prominent enough that they perceive the vowel in "rang" to be noticeably different from the vowels in "ran" and "ram". For some of these speakers, there may be some kind of merger or near-merger with the phoneme /eɪ/ as in "rate." This doesn't cause much disruption to the system of vowel contrasts in English because the sequene /eɪŋ/ does not exist otherwise. This is similar in some ways to the change of /ɪŋ/ to [ɪjŋ] or /iŋ/ that is observed in some American English speakers, although I don't know if these changes tend to occur in the same areas or not. (For more on "ing", see the following post and the various linked posts: Why is /ɪŋk/ used with "ink" words when the actual pronunciation is /ijŋk/?)

Another similar change may occur for some speakers before the /g/ vowel, where it does cause a merger of previously distinguishable sounds (although the merged sound is sometimes perceived, or at least described as being closer to /æ/ than to /eɪ/). This is mentioned in the following post: Pronunciation of vowel in vague as [æ] instead of [eɪ].

herisson
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Thank uses a long a sound /ei/ with regard to most American accents. Dictionary uses the wide short a but truly, if you listen closely, it is the long a /ei/ for words like thank and ankle. the nk changes the long a slightly and that's why people may feel it is the wide short a. However, try to say it as if you are using the sound in the word cat vs the sound in the word made. I hear it as the long a when I slow it down.

user476171
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