Vowel

Legend: unrounded • rounded A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract,[1] forming the nucleus of a syllable.

[6] The approximants [j] and [w] illustrate this: both are without much of a constriction in the vocal tract (so phonetically they seem to be vowel-like), but they occur at the onset of syllables (e.g. in "yet" and "wet") which suggests that phonologically they are consonants.

A similar debate arises over whether a word like bird in a rhotic dialect has an r-colored vowel /ɝ/ or a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/.

However, Maddieson and Emmory (1985) demonstrated from a range of languages that semivowels are produced with a narrower constriction of the vocal tract than vowels, and so may be considered consonants on that basis.

The IPA Handbook concedes that "the vowel quadrilateral must be regarded as an abstraction and not a direct mapping of tongue position.

Height is defined by the inverse of the F1 value: the higher the frequency of the first formant, the lower (more open) the vowel.

Japanese /u/, for example, is an exolabial (compressed) back vowel, and sounds quite different from an English endolabial /u/.

The conception of the tongue moving in two directions, high–low and front–back, is not supported by articulatory evidence and does not clarify how articulation affects vowel quality.

), can be secondarily qualified as close or open, as in the traditional conception, but this refers to jaw rather than tongue position.

This opposition has traditionally been thought to be a result of greater muscular tension, though phonetic experiments have repeatedly failed to show this.

In American English, lax vowels [ɪ, ʊ, ɛ, ʌ, æ] do not appear in stressed open syllables.

[citation needed] Advanced tongue root (ATR) is a feature common across much of Africa, the Pacific Northwest, and scattered other languages such as Modern Mongolian.

The greatest degree of pharyngealisation is found in the strident vowels of the Khoisan languages, where the larynx is raised, and the pharynx constricted, so that either the epiglottis or the arytenoid cartilages vibrate instead of the vocal cords.

The IPA has long provided two letters for obscure vowels, mid ⟨ə⟩ and lower ⟨ɐ⟩, neither of which are defined for rounding.

The most important prosodic variables are pitch (fundamental frequency), loudness (intensity) and length (duration).

In phonology, diphthongs and triphthongs are distinguished from sequences of monophthongs by whether the vowel sound may be analyzed into distinct phonemes.

), single words in English lacking written vowels can be indistinguishable; consider dd, which could be any of dad, dada, dado, dead, deed, did, died, diode, dodo, dud, dude, odd, add, and aided.

The Masoretes devised a vowel notation system for Hebrew Jewish scripture that is still widely used, as well as the trope symbols used for its cantillation; both are part of oral tradition and still the basis for many bible translations—Jewish and Christian.

The Germanic languages have some of the largest inventories: Standard Danish has 11 to 13 short vowels (/(a), ɑ, (ɐ), e, ə, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u, ø, œ, y/), while the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian has been reported to have thirteen long vowels: /i, y, e, ø, ɛ, œ, æ, ɶ, a, ɒ, ɔ, o, u/.

[citation needed] The situation can be quite disparate within a same family language: Spanish and French are two closely related Romance languages but Spanish has only five pure vowel qualities, /a, e, i, o, u/, while classical French has eleven: /a, ɑ, e, ɛ, i, o, ɔ, u, y, œ, ø/ and four nasal vowels /ɑ̃/, /ɛ̃/, /ɔ̃/ and /œ̃/.

The Mon–Khmer languages of Southeast Asia also have some large inventories, such as the eleven vowels of Vietnamese: /i, e, ɛ, ɐ, a, ə, ɔ, ɤ, o, ɯ, u/.

A large fraction of the languages of North America happen to have a four-vowel system without /u/: /i, e, a, o/; Nahuatl and Navajo are examples.

In rhotic dialects of English, as in Canada and the United States, there are many words such as bird, learn, girl, church, worst, worm, myrrh that some phoneticians analyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/.

There are a few such words that are disyllabic, like cursor, curtain, and turtle: [ˈkɹ̩sɹ̩], [ˈkɹ̩tn̩] and [ˈtɹ̩tl̩] (or [ˈkɝːsɚ], [ˈkɝːtən], and [ˈtɝːtəl]), and even a few that are trisyllabic, at least in some accents, such as purpler [ˈpɹ̩.pl̩.ɹ̩], hurdler [ˈhɹ̩.dl̩.ɹ̩], gurgler [ˈɡɹ̩.ɡl̩.ɹ̩], and certainer [ˈsɹ̩.tn̩.ɹ̩].

Onomatopoeic words that can be pronounced alone, and that have no vowels or ars, include hmm, pst!, shh!, tsk!, and zzz.

[34] (In Mandarin Chinese, words and syllables such as sī and zhī are sometimes described as being syllabic fricatives and affricates phonemically, /ś/ and /tʂ́/, but these do have a voiced segment that carries the tone.)

In the Japonic language Miyako, there are words with no voiced sounds, such as ss 'dust', kss 'breast/milk', pss 'day', ff 'a comb', kff 'to make', fks 'to build', ksks 'month', sks 'to cut', psks 'to pull'.

Lexical words are somewhat rarer in English and are generally restricted to a single syllable: eye, awe, owe, and in non-rhotic accents air, ore, err.

In Swahili (Bantu), for example, there is aua 'to survey' and eua 'to purify' (both three syllables); in Japanese, aoi 青い 'blue/green' and oioi 追々 'gradually' (three and four morae); and in Finnish, aie 'intention' and auo 'open!'

Hawaiian, and the Polynesian languages generally, have unusually large numbers of such words, such as aeāea (a small green fish), which is three syllables: ae.āe.a.

X-rays of Daniel Jones' [i, u, a, ɑ]
The original vowel quadrilateral, from Jones' articulation. The vowel trapezoid of the modern IPA, and at the top of this article, is a simplified rendition of this diagram. The bullets are the cardinal vowel points. (A parallel diagram covers the front and central rounded and back unrounded vowels.) The cells indicate the ranges of articulation that could reasonably be transcribed with those cardinal vowel letters, [i, e, ɛ, a, ɑ, ɔ, o, u, ɨ] , and non-cardinal [ə] . If a language distinguishes fewer than these vowel qualities, [e, ɛ] could be merged to ⟨ e ⟩, [o, ɔ] to ⟨ o ⟩, [a, ɑ] to ⟨ a ⟩, etc. If a language distinguishes more, ⟨ ɪ ⟩ could be added where the ranges of [i, e, ɨ, ə] intersect, ⟨ ʊ ⟩ where [u, o, ɨ, ə] intersect, and ⟨ ɐ ⟩ where [ɛ, ɔ, a, ɑ, ə] intersect.
Idealistic tongue positions of cardinal front vowels with highest point indicated
Front, raised and retracted are the three articulatory dimensions of vowel space. Open and close refer to the jaw, not the tongue.
Spectrogram of vowels [i, u, ɑ] . [ɑ] is a low vowel, so its F1 value is higher than that of [i] and [u] , which are high vowels. [i] is a front vowel, so its F2 is substantially higher than that of [u] and [ɑ] , which are back vowels.