Pronunciation: Lunch vs Lunge

The pronunciations are stated /lʌntʃ/ and /lʌndʒ/ on Cambridge dictionary, by hearing the audios provided the only difference I can spot is that they tend to drag the first syllable of Lunge a bit longer.

But /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ sound identical to me here. Is there a difference that I failed to identify with my non-native ears?

• Lunch
• Lunge

Solution 1:

lunch /lʌnt͡ʃ/ → [lʌ̃̆ʃ] but lunge /lʌnd͡ʒ/ → [lɐ̠nd͡ʒ]

Native speakers often take cues from subtle phonetic changes in actual pronunciation that occur naturally but which are not phonemically distinct to help them identify which particular word is actually being said.

That means we’re going off more clues that would be readily apparent if you merely read the very broad phonemic pronunciations that a dictionary offers. In other words, there’s more to it than just a change in voicing in the final phoneme of lunch /lʌnt͡ʃ/ and lunge /lʌnd͡ʒ/. However, just which changes these are depends entirely on the regional accent of the speaker.

In my own speech from the western Great Lakes dialect of North America, there is the same compensation and differentiation in these two words’ respective vowels as we see occurring in tight [tʰʌ̆ɪt̚] versus tide [tʰaɪd]. The unvoiced (and often unreleased) stop at the end of tight both raises and shortens the vowel preceding it through regressive assimilation, whereas the voiced stop at the end of tide does not.

So while I say [lɐ̠nd͡ʒ] for lunge, with a somewhat longer vowel that’s a little lower in my mouth (the tongue isn’t as high) and retracted somewhat, I may well say no more than [lʌ̃̆ʃ] for lunch with its vowel ever so slightly raised and shortened. Because lunch is shorter to say, you may not spend as much time enunciating the /n/ separately; the (non-phonemic) nasalization of the vowel is enough to alert the listener to presence of the underlying nasal phoneme. There’s also little left of the opening alveolar stop in the affricated /t͡ʃ/ phoneme, leaving behind little more than [ʃ] alone.

The two vowels, despite being the same phoneme, for me phonetically become distinct, providing the needed cues to tell one word from the other:

• lunch with [ʌ̃̆] – the open-mid unrounded vowel ʌ with two added diacritics added to modify the sound:
  1. the diacritic ◌̃ to mean it’s been nasalized
  2. the diacritic ◌̆ to mean that it’s extra short
• lunge with [ɐ̠] — the near-open central vowel ɐ, which is also unrounded, combined with:
  1. the diacritic ◌̠ to mean that it’s also retracted.

If I’d wanted to, I could have marked the vowel in lunge as “half-long” via [ɐˑ] instead of shortening the vowel in lunch. The point is that in my own speech, the two differ in both length and height.

Native speakers of other English dialects than my own may well not do this exact same thing. They might have no subtle cues — or they might have minor modifications of their own that their ears are attuned to. Just look at the actual phonetics used in young by native speakers from around the world, and you’ll see how different these can be.

Summary

Don’t get hung up on these super-detailed, tight phonetic transcriptions; they’re really meant only for specialists. They’re far too technical for the broad phonemic transcriptions found in dictionaries that are meant for the general public.

The key point to take away from this is that in order for a native speaker to tell one word from another, we very often rely on extremely subtle changes in actual phonetic pronunciations in ways that the dictionary will never show you, and also which the speakers themselves are almost certainly unaware of.

In this regard it’s just like how the /p/ of spoke is quite a different sound from the /p/ in poke, and yet you won’t find that distinction in a normal dictionary.

Solution 2:

If you were to compare, say, "inches" and "hinges", you will probably hear the difference more clearly. In your examples, those phonemes appear at the very end of the utterance, so the voicing ends earlier. In other words, what I believe is happening in such cases, is that you have some kind of "half voicing": the first part of the phoneme is voiced, the second part becomes voiceless. The difference is still noticeable, or at least I think so (how far can we really trust our ears?), although the biggest hint to be able to distinguish them is probably going to come from the vowel length. The vowel in "lunch" is shorter because it occurs before a voiceless phoneme, and it's a phenomenon that is probably common in most varieties of English.