Doug Blumeyer, an American researcher, analyzed words from the British National Corpus to determine the relative frequency of English phonemes. His research was based on American English. This could be significant because dialects of English vary in the phonemes which they use.
According to his research, the most common phoneme is the schwa. It is followed by the alveolar nasal, the alveolar approximant, the voiceless alveolar plosive and the high front lax vowel. In non-rhotic varieties of English the alveolar approximant is not pronounced in words such as car. For this reason, the frequency of this phoneme must be lower in such varieties of English.
The schwa is undoubtedly a very common vowel in English. In the word banana, it occurs in both the first and third syllables of the word. The alveolar nasal is also very common and is present in the affixes -ness (happiness), un- (unhappy), non- (nonsense), -ant (assistant) and -en (brighten).
The rhotic approximant occurs in comparatives such as faster and newer. However, many linguists claim that these words have an r-coloured vowel. In this case, the frequency of the rhotic approximant decreases.
The voiceless alveolar approximant is a very common consonant. It occurs with superlatives such as fastest and newest. It also occurs in consonant clusters such as plant, style and true.
The high front lax vowel is more common than the tense counterpart. However, the use of this phoneme varies in words such as rabbit and roses. Speakers with the weak vowel merger use a schwa in the unstressed syllables. Nevertheless, the vowel occurs in many English words such as fish, it and six.
Based on the relative frequency of English phonemes, it appears that alveolar consonants and front vowels are common. The schwa, a central vowel, is common because it is so frequent in unstressed syllables. The voiceless alveolar plosive is a common phoneme not only in English but in many languages.
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