Pronunciation exercises: /eɪ/ vs /aɪ/

IPA phoneme /aɪ/ IPA phoneme /eɪ/ The diphthongs /eɪ/ and /aɪ/ are different in all dialects of English. However /eɪ/ in some accents sounds very similar to /aɪ/ in others.

Dialect	/eɪ/	/aɪ/
Received Pronunciation and General American	[eɪ]	[aɪ]
Estuary English	[ʌɪ]	ɑɪ]
Australian English	[æɪ]	[ɑe, ɑi]

Many, if not most students will greatly improve their pronunciation by simply becoming aware of certain differences - together with a minimum of practice. A simple way of introducing the difficulty is with common words like type vs tape and light vs late.

/eɪ/

• date - face - gate - hate - rain
• day - may - pay - ray - way

/aɪ/

• fine - height - price - time
• die - my - pie - rye - why

/eɪ/ vs /aɪ/

• ail/ale - aisle/I’ll/isle; bail - bile; bait - bite/byte; bay - by/buy; day - die/dye; fail - file; fate - fight; hate - height; lake - like; lane - line; late - light/lite; mail/male - mile; make - Mike/mic; mate - might/mite; may - my; paint - pint; pale/pail - pile; race/raise - rice/rise; rate - right/rite; sane - sign/sine; stale - style; tale/tail - tile; tame - thyme/time; tape - type; tray - try; wait/weight - white/wight; way/whey - why; whale - while/wile;
• trade - tried; weighed/wade - wide;
• prays/praise - price/prize; rays/raise - rise/rice; ways/weighs - wise

The Rain in Spain

This famous song is used in the movie My Fair Lady to practice the /eɪ/ sound, which in cockney sounds more like /aɪ/ or [æɪ]. Note that cockneys don’t confuse late and light because they pronounce [læɪt] and [lɑɪt].

The full sentence is The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.

Australian accent

The Australian /eɪ/ sounds [æɪ], which is heard as [aɪ] by many foreigners. Hence the nickname strine /straɪn/, a supposed shortening of [ɒˈstraɪliːən]. However in Australian English no confusion exists, because /aɪ/ is pronounced [ɑe] or [ɑi].

See also

• Homophones