In this paper, we describe the one channel five-way, V/U/M/N/S (Voice/Unvoice/Nasal/Silent), classification algorithm for automatically classifying speech. The decision making process is viewed as a pattern viewed as a pattern recognition problem. Two aspects of the algorithm are developed: feature selection and classifier type. The feature selection procedure is studied for identifying a set of features to make V/U/M/N/S classification. The classifiers used are a vector quantization (VQ), a neural network(NN), and a decision tree method. Actual five sentences spoken by six speakers, three male and three female, are tested with proposed classifiers. From a set of measurement tests, the proposed classifiers show fairly good accuracy for V/U/M/N/S decision.