Like all languages, English has two classes of sounds, CONSONANTS and VOWELS.

The English sound system has 44 phonemes or basic sounds.

Twenty-five of these sounds are consonant phonemes.
Nineteen of these sounds are vowel phonemes.

The English alphabet has 26 graphemes or basic symbols.

Five of these represent vowels--a  e  i  o  u (and sometimes y).
The other 19 letters are consonant symbols.

There are 25 CONSONANT SOUNDS in English. The consonant phonemes in the overall sound system of American English are:

*Note: You may find other symbols used in transcribing phonemes. Also, whenever phonemes are transcribed, they are enclosed by /brackets/.

The phonemes /ng/ and /zh/ never occur at the beginning of English words, although they are common beginning sounds in other languages.

The phonemes /h/, /w/, and /y/ don’t occur as final sounds. They are called GLIDES. When these phonemes come before a vowel, they act like consonants, as in heck, well, and yell. When they follow a vowel, they combine with the vowel sounds as in ahhhh (the sound you make when you taste a delicious piece of apple pie), cow, and boy.

The initial /hw/ phoneme is also never found at the end of an English word.

The SOUND-SYMBOL RELATIONSHIPS FOR CONSONANTS are more regular or predictable than they are for vowels, but they are not perfect.

The same consonant letter can represent more than one sound.

EXAMPLE: the sounds represented by the letter s at the beginning of sound and sugar.

The same sound can be represented in different ways.

EXAMPLE: the /k/ phoneme is represented by the letter c at the beginning of cat, by k at the beginning of kiss, by ch at the beginning of chorus, and by ck at the end of click.

These differences notwithstanding, consonant sound-symbol relationships are more regular and predictable than those of vowels are.