Which languages share sounds with English?


More accurately entitled, A typology of consonantal segment inventories of the world's most spoken languages, and also Welsh.

See this post on the International Phonetic Alphabet for explanations of the column and row names, and for how to pronounce the English sounds.
My observation: the English dental fricatives (the sounds we write <th>, ð as in <this> and θ as in <thin>) are weird. More to come on this topic in a future post.


Show place labels Show manner labels Shade impossible articulations Shade empty boxes

Bilablial
Labiodental
Dental
Alveolar
Postalveolar
Retroflex
Palatal
Velar
Uvular
Pharyngeal
Glottal
Plosive
p
b
t
d
ʈ
ɖ
c
ɟ
k
g
q
ɢ
ʔ
Nasal
m
ɱ
n
ɳ
ɲ
ŋ
ɴ
Trill
r
ʀ
Tap or Flap
ɾ
ɽ
Fricative
ɸ
β
f
v
θ
ð
s
z
ʃ
ʒ
ʂ
ʐ
ç
ʝ
x
ɣ
χ
ʁ
ħ
ʕ
h
ɦ
Lateral Fricative
ɬ
ɮ
Approximant
ʋ
ɹ
ɻ
j
ɰ
Lateral Approximant
l
ɭ
ʎ
ʟ

You can show and hide symbols using the buttons below. (This works on Chrome and Firefox. It doesn't appear to work on Internet Explorer.)
Notice that the order matters: if you show English and French, then remove the English, you will get the French sounds that do not occur in English - a different result from only showing the French! Use the "All IPA symbols" to start again if you lose track of what you've clicked.
  • All IPA symbols

  • (Standard Mandarin) Chinese
  • Spanish
  • English
  • (Modern Standard) Arabic
  • Hindi
  • Bengali
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Japanese
  • German
  • French
  • Welsh



This IPA chart only shows the pulmonic consonants with one place of articulation, and no diacritics. It therefore does not show:
  • Vowels
  • Clicks, implosives and ejectives
  • Multiple articulation (e.g. /w/), affricates and double articulations
  • Whether a language has dental or alveolar plosives, or both
The phonemes shown are for the most widely spoken dialects of the language, without sounds found only in loan-words.
They are just to give you an idea of which phonemes should already be familiar to you from languages you know - it's not necessarily a very accurate description of any language's phoneme inventory!

English has sounds from both Standard Southern British English and General American English. I've included the American flap [ɾ], from words like butter (sounds a bit like 'buder' to British English speakers), despite the fact it is an allophone (a variant of [t] or [d]).
Some Spanish dialects do actually have both [θ] and [ð] - in words like cerveza and donde - but as the spelling hints, these are allophones - variants of [s] and [d].
Bengali has both fricative and stop versions of p~ɸ etc - I'm not sure if these are allophonic variants or dialectal variation.
Japanese flap is undefined for laterality - i.e. it varies between r and l sounds to the English ear.