Learning Spanish

Diptongos y Triftongos

Diphthongs and Triphthongs.
I'll try to post more!!

(Below is copied from https://www.fluentu.com/blog/spanish/spanish-vowels/)

Simply put, a diphthong forms when two vowels are combined into a single syllable. The sound begins on the first vowel, then progressively moves toward the sound of the second vowel. Some examples of diphthongs in English can be found in the words "loud," "foil," "boy" and "say."

When talking about Spanish diphthongs, we need to bear in mind a very important thing: a Spanish diphthong can only be formed if we have at least one unaccented weak vowel (the word unaccented is very important here, as you will see in the hiatuses section).

It is not within the scope of this post to give you a lecture on types of vowels, so I will just tell you that the two Spanish weak vowels are i and u.

As long as you have at least one of these two vowels together with another vowel, you will be looking at a diphthong.

The pronunciation of the vowels in a diphthong is not different from the pronunciation of each vowel separately. As stated before, each Spanish vowel has a unique sound that never ever changes. The only thing that can change in a word in the stressed vowel, but never the pronunciation.

Do not confuse a stressed vowel with an accented vowel, though! All words have one (and only one) stressed syllable, but not all of them have an accent mark. It all depends on the accent mark rules. For instance:

amor (love) — o is the stressed vowel but it has no accent mark

salón (living-room) — o is the stressed vowel and it needs an accent mark

camión (truck) — o is the stressed vowel and it needs an accent mark. It is part of a diphthong, but the pronunciation is exactly the same as in the first two examples.

Summing up, a vowel can be stressed or not stressed. Depending on where the stressed vowel is, the overall pronunciation of the word will be different, but the sound of the vowel will remain exactly the same.

Imagine English has the imaginary word feefee. You can stress either the first fee or the second one. Let's assume fee is always pronounced "fi." In that case, you can only have either fifi (stress on the first syllable) or fifi (stress on the second syllable), but fi will always sound like fi. This is exactly what happens with Spanish vowels.

Now let's go back to diphthongs. As you may imagine, diphthongs come in many forms, so I have arranged an alphabetical list of Spanish ones so you can see them in action. The following list and examples are not something you should necessarily memorize. Instead, gave a look at them, try saying them out loud and try to come up with more examples if you can.

You only have to remember that if you have an i or a u together or with another vowel, you have a Spanish diphthong. Check them out!

ai/ay

Remember that we are treating y as a vowel in this post, and more precisely as a weak vowel. Here are some examples with these diphthongs:

ai: bailar (to dance), aire (air), vainilla (vanilla)

ay: hay (there is/are), espray (spray), ¡ay¡ (alas!)

au

aumento (increase), cautela (caution), auténtico (authentic)

ei/ey

Same as with ai/ay, we treat the y as a weak vowel:

ei: peinar (to comb), reina (queen), aceite (oil)

ey: rey (king), ley (law), virrey (viceroy)

eu

deuda (debt), reunión (meeting), Europa (Europe)