Near-close vowel

An example of such language is Danish, which contrasts short and long versions of the close front unrounded /i/, near-close front unrounded /e̝/ and close-mid front unrounded /e/ vowels, though in order to avoid using any relative articulation diacritics, Danish /e̝/ and /e/ are typically transcribed with phonetically inaccurate symbols /e/ and /ɛ/, respectively.

[1] This contrast is not present in Conservative Danish, which realizes the latter two vowels as, respectively, close-mid [e] and mid [e̞].

[3] In the case of this language, the near-close vowels /ɪ, ʊ/ tend to be transcribed with the phonetically inaccurate symbols /ɨ, ʉ/, i.e. as if they were close central.

It may be somewhat more common for languages to contain allophonic vowel triplets that are not contrastive; for instance, Russian has one such triplet:[4] The near-close vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are: The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association defines these vowels as mid-centralized (lowered and centralized) equivalents of, respectively, [i], [y] and [u],[5] therefore, an alternative transcription of these vowels is [i̽, y̽, u̽] or the more complex [ï̞, ÿ˕, ü̞]; however, they are not centralized in all languages - some languages have a fully front variant of [ɪ] and/or a fully back variant of [ʊ];[6] the exact backness of these variants can be transcribed in the IPA with [ɪ̟, ʊ̠], [i̞, u̞] or [e̝, o̝].

There also are near-close vowels that don't have dedicated symbols in the IPA: (IPA letters for rounded vowels are ambiguous as to whether the rounding is protrusion or compression.

Vowel diagram illustrating the /i–ɪ̟–e/ and /u–ʊ̠–o/ contrasts in Sotho, from Doke & Mofokeng (1974 :?). The near-close vowels are normally transcribed without diacritics (i.e. as ⟨ ɪ ⟩ and ⟨ ʊ ⟩, respectively), or even with the symbols for close central vowels (⟨ ɨ ⟩ and ⟨ ʉ ⟩, respectively), though the latter set is not phonetically correct.