Describing Spoken English provides a practical introduction to the pronunciation of contemporary English. Requiring no prior knowledge of phonetics or phonology, the book examines the main varieties of English, focusing on the elements common to all native-speaker varieties and presents the differences as minor variations on a theme.

The book is divided into twelve chapters which cover speech production, principles of phonological analysis, consonants, the vowel systems of different varieties of the language, syllable structure, strong and weak syllables, phonological processes in connected speech, stress in simple words and compounds, tone units and utterances, the role of accent in discourse, and the interrelations of morphology and phonology. Presented in an accessible jargon-free style, Describing Spoken English will be essential for all students of the English language and linguistics.