**This article uses symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent phonemes of various languages. It was deliberately written without using the adaptive notation you selected in your profile because many symbols shown do not apply to English. For consistency, one notation system that could represent all phonemes had to be used throughout.

When adapting Cued Speech to other languages, it can be helpful to review established versions. These adaptations reveal distributions of phonemes to cues that have proven to be sufficiently visually contrastive. In other words, the phonemes that are grouped together on one cue look different enough on the mouth to be clear and unambiguous. Additionally, it can be useful to allow overlap among versions of Cued Speech. For example, the phoneme /mmmmmmmmm/ is represented by handshape 5 in many versions of Cued Speech. This facilitates a cuer's ability to acquire other CS systems and helps them to receive, with some familiarity, the modality even while they are acquiring a new language. 

The following is a comparison of phoneme assignment to Cued Speech cues by language. In some cases, you'll find that a phoneme may not be represented in the same way in every adaptation. This occurs for several reasons: 1) the other phonemes in that language required a different distribution to make each visually distinct; 2) the relatively fewer number of phonemes allowed for a distribution on fewer cues facilitating the ease in which one could learn to cue. So the cues were placed on as few handshapes and placements as possible; or 3) the categorization of a phoneme or phonemes was different to native users of that language. For example, the consonant phonemes that occur near the end of the word lasagna are likely to be perceived as two phonemes by an American cuer (i.e., /n/ /j/). However, a French cuer would perceive only a single phoneme (i.e., /ɲ/). These would then be cued as two handshapes by an American cuer (handshapes 4 and 8), but only one handshape by a French cuer (handshape 6).

Monophthong Vowels

1 The monopthong vowels /e/ and /o/ occur in some dialects American English, but these are nearly always cued as diphthongs except in the case of words like hang and thanks where the convention is to cue the vowel as /æ/.

2 The monophthong vowel /o/ is not cued in England, but (unlike in the U.S.) the diphthong /oʊ/ was included as a side-throat diphthong in this adaptation.