Consonant Clusters, buster! Part One

What’s a consonant cluster? Sometimes words in English present with a group of two or more consonants. These appear together in a word without any vowels between them. You can find these clusters at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Let’s look at the word “strength." The "str" at the beginning and "ngth" at the end represent consonant clusters.

STRENGTH is a case of a lot of consonants all in one short word, but keep in mind that most consonant clusters consist of two or three consonants together. If we go through the sounds of the alphabet, we can create the following table to visualize all of the possible sound combinations at the beginning of a word:

S is a case to itself. This sound can combine with /f/, /k/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /p/, /t/ and /w/.

Here are some examples:

In addition to the consonant clusters beginning with /s/ mentioned above, you will find that some /s/ sounds can combine further with /l/, /r/, /w/, and /j/ to make clusters of three consonants.

*In American English, words like student, stupid, and studio are often pronounced as /stu-/ without the /stj/ (as in "st" followed by a "y" sound), but the /stj/ pronunciation can sometimes be heard in more careful speech.

As we stated before, you can also find consonant clusters at the end of words. There are actually more possible combinations of consonant clusters in this position than at the beginning of a word. Words can have up to four consonants when the cluster is at the end of the word.

There are many other combinations to be aware of. Consonant clusters are often produced when a word ends in s or in ed, such as when we conjugate a verb in the third person singular or make a word plural, or when we use the past simple form of many regular verbs: i.e.; cats /ts/ and dogs /gz/, sleeps /ps/ and runs /nz/, or touched /ʧt/ and saved /vd/.

Some consonant clusters are difficult to say even for native speakers, so much so that they often minimize sounds or leave them out entirely. How do you think you would pronounce the following?

PRODUCTS: CLIENTS: ASKED: TWELFTH.

Find out in our next post, or sign up for a class with us and learn to recognize lots of other traits about this sometimes frustrating language that we all love.