IPA reference · vowel
a — open front unrounded vowel
A fully open vowel made toward the front of the mouth.
How to make the open front unrounded vowel
Drop the jaw as far as it goes with the tongue forward. This is the "a" of most European languages, and it is not the English "a" of "cat" or "father".
This sound does not occur in standard English. That means there is no word you can say to find it by accident; you have to build it from the articulatory instruction above and check it against a recording.
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 a, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
The English "cat" vowel is higher and more constricted.
What this means for learners
English lacks a clean cardinal /a/, so learners import either /æ/ or /ɑː/ — both audibly wrong in Romance languages.
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 a attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol a make?
a is the open front unrounded vowel. A fully open vowel made toward the front of the mouth. It does not occur in standard English.
How do you pronounce a?
Drop the jaw as far as it goes with the tongue forward. This is the "a" of most European languages, and it is not the English "a" of "cat" or "father".
Which languages have the open front unrounded vowel?
Among the languages covered here: Spanish (casa, “house”); Italian (casa, “house”); Japanese (あ, “a”).
What is the difference between a and æ?
The English "cat" vowel is higher and more constricted.