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In the English language, there are in practice relatively few monophthongs. The position, beginnings, and endings of vowel articulation are perhaps the chief distinguishing feature among the various dialects of English; the deep gulf between British English and American English is a result of the different realization of vowel sounds. The conversion of monophthongs to diphthongs, or of diphthongs to monophthongs, is a major cause of language change . Some sounds that are (arguably) perceived as monophthongs in both these varieties of English are in fact diphthongs, such as the vowel sound in pay ( SAMPA /peI/). In British English, the sound of /o:/ as in boat tends to become a diphthong /@U/; American English has either a pure vowel /o:/ or a diphthong with much less change of articulation /oU/ in this position. On the other hand, some dialects of English make monophthongs out of former diphthongs, such as the speech of the southern United States, which tends to alter the diphthong /aI/ as in eye to a vowel sound somewhere between /a:/ and /{/. Another new diphthong that has arisen from a former monophthong can be heard in some American English pronunciation of words like pin, in which the /n/ sound becomes syllabic, and to the listener it sounds like it is preceded by a short mid central vowel.
Historically, some languages treat vowel sounds that were formerly diphthongs as monophthongs. Such is the case in Sanskrit, in whose grammar the sounds now realised as /e/ and /o/ are conceptually ai and au, and are written that way in the Devanagari and related alphabets. The sounds /ai/ and /au/ exist in Sanskrit, but are written as if they were âi and âu, with long initial vowels. Similar processes of the creation of new monophthongs from old diphthongs are preserved in the traditional spellings of languages as diverse as French and modern Greek.