2 /5 HAR H: Diphthong
Your television advertisement is an insult to our beautiful language,
AND EXCHANGE instead of "and exchange" in your ad.
A diphthong is a sound chain that consists of the articulation of two vowels, one following the other,1 without interruption and producing a smooth transition in the sound frequencies that characterize the timbres of each of the two vowels. Phonologically, two vowels articulated in this way are part of the same syllable.
In a diphthong the acoustic formants have a smooth transition from one point in the vowel area to another, which gives them their nature as diphthongs. This corresponds to an articulation in which the tongue moves between different points during the emission of the diphthong. The two extreme points of the articulation are perceived as the two vowels that form the diphthong. In the spectrogram of a hiatus, the transition zone is not observed, which is why they are phonetically different.
Although most of the worlds languages have phonetic diphthongs in their repertoire, there are some languages that completely lack diphthongs. The quality of the vowels that can form a diphthong varies from one language to another.
