LoginHow to Pronounce the /ɑ/ Sound
In this lesson, we are going to learn how the sound /ɑ/ is produced by looking at the articulatory organs.
What Type of Sound Is /ɑ/?
/ɑ/ is a long vowel. You can make this sound like when you go to the doctor and they ask you to open your mouth and say "aah."
How to Produce /ɑ/?
To produce it, open your mouth completely, lower your jaw completely, and keep your lips ungrounded. When producing this sound, your mouth is slightly more open than when producing the /æ/ sound. However, the mouth is slightly less rounded than saying the /ɔ/ sound as you can see in the picture.
Tip!
As you have seen before in the examples, When two dots come after the sound as in /ɑː/, It indicates that it is pronounced as a long vowel sound, not as a short or weak sound.
/ɑ/ Around the World
As you see in the table below, /ɑ/ does not exist in most of the common languages around the world. If this sound does not exist in your language you may need a little practice to produce it.
Existence | Example | |
|---|---|---|
Mandarin | ✔ | 阳 (yáng) |
Spanish | x | - |
Hindi | x | - |
Bengali | x | - |
Portuguese | x | - |
Russian | x | - |
Japanese | x | - |
Vietnamese | x | - |
Turkish | x | - |
French¹ | ✔ | pâte |
German | x | - |
Italian | x | - |
Persian | x | - |
Standard Arabic | ✔ | قارئ |
Korean | x | - |
Indonesian² | ✔ | qari |
Filipino | x | - |
Hungarian | x | - |
Dutch | ✔ | bad |
Polish | x | - |
Romanian | x | - |
Swedish | ✔ | mat |
Czech | x | - |
Greek | x | - |
Ukrainian | ✔ | гай |
Urdu | x | - |
¹ The sound exists in some parts of France.
² The sound exists in the form of an allophone of /a/ in Arabic loanwords.
Listening
Let us listen to the pronunciation of the /ɑ/ sound which has been mentioned below:
Down below, there are two other sounds similar to the /ɑ/ sound. At first, listen to the /æ/ sound and then listen to the /ɔ/ sound:
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