IPA reference · vowel
æ — near-open front unrounded vowel
The vowel of "cat" — front and low but not fully open.
Also called: ash, short a
How to make the near-open front unrounded vowel
Front the tongue and lower it, with some tension and spreading in the lips.
English reference points: cat, bad, trap. If you speak English natively you already produce this sound — the work is recognising it and placing it where the target language wants it.
Languages that use it
Sounds it gets confused with
Most pronunciation errors are not random — they are a substitution of the nearest sound the speaker already owns. These are the usual substitutions for æ, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
The "bad/bed" contrast, which many learners of English collapse.
What this means for learners
Finnish ä and Estonian ä are this vowel, and in Finnish the ä/a distinction drives the whole vowel harmony system.
Teaching this sound
Describing a sound in words gets a student roughly half the way there. The other half is hearing it produced correctly, immediately after producing it incorrectly, with both versions available to replay. That is the argument for recording during the lesson rather than after it: the student leaves with your model of æ attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol æ make?
æ is the near-open front unrounded vowel. The vowel of "cat" — front and low but not fully open. In English you can hear it in: cat, bad, trap.
How do you pronounce æ?
Front the tongue and lower it, with some tension and spreading in the lips.
Which languages have the near-open front unrounded vowel?
Among the languages covered here: Finnish (päivä, “day”); Hungarian (kép, “picture (é is close-mid)”).
What is the difference between æ and ɛ?
The "bad/bed" contrast, which many learners of English collapse.