In this video we are going to look at the topic of consonant lengthening in English. You already know that we have long and short vowel sounds in English? But what about consonants? It’s a little different here. Usually, consonant length is not a distinctive feature of English, that means the length of a consonant sound does not result in a change of meaning. However, we do sometimes have slightly longer consonant sounds across word boundaries and morphemes if the two adjacent sounds are the same fricative, plosive or nasal sound. In the video we’ll have a look at several examples and also discuss some pairs of words where omitting gemination could lead to confusion.