One of the two main categories of speech sound (the other being consonant). Phonetically, a vowel is a sound produced when the air flows freely through the mouth without constriction from the pharynx, tongue, or lips - an oral vowel; it may also flow partly through the nose (a nasal vowel). Vowel quality is determined by the shape of the lips and the position of the tongue. Phonologically, a vowel is defined by its function in the structure of a syllable: it forms the nucleus of the syllable, and (unlike a consonant) can stand alone (as in such words as I and a in English).
| Manners of articulation | ||||||
| Obstruent | ||||||
| Click | ||||||
| Plosive | ||||||
| Ejective | ||||||
| Implosive | ||||||
| Affricate | ||||||
| Fricative | ||||||
| Sibilant | ||||||
| Sonorant | ||||||
| Nasal | ||||||
| Flaps/Tap | ||||||
| Trill | ||||||
| Approximant | ||||||
| Liquid | ||||||
| Vowel | ||||||
| Semivowel | ||||||
| Lateral | ||||||
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This page contains phonetic information in IPA, which may not display correctly in some browsers. In all languages, vowels form the nucleus or peak of syllables, whereas consonants form the onset and (in languages which have them) coda. The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "speaking", because in most languages words and thus speech are not possible without vowels. text-align:right;"> Edit - 2× |
Front | N.-front | Central | N.-back | Back | |
| Close |
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| Near-close | ||||||
| Close-mid | ||||||
| Mid | ||||||
| Open-mid | ||||||
| Near-open | ||||||
| Open | ||||||
represents a rounded vowel.
The articulatory features that distinguish different vowels in a language are said to determine the vowel's quality. Daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the common features height (vertical dimension), backness (horizontal dimension) and roundedness (lip position). In high vowels, such as [i] and [u], the tongue is positioned high in the mouth, whereas in low vowels, such as [a], the tongue is positioned low in the mouth. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies seven different vowel heights, although no known language distinguishes all seven:
close vowel (high vowel) near-close vowel close-mid vowel mid vowel open-mid vowel near-open vowel open vowel (low vowel)It may be that some varieties of German have five contrasting vowel heights independently of length or other parameters. The Bavarian dialect of Amstetten has thirteen long vowels, reported to distinguish four heights (close, close-mid, mid, and near-open) each among the front unrounded, front rounded, and back rounded vowels, plus an open central vowel: /i e ɛ̝ æ̝/, /y ø œ̝ ɶ̝/, /u o ɔ̝ ɒ̝/, /a/.
The parameter of vowel height appears to be the primary feature of vowels cross-linguistically in that all languages use height contrastively. Some languages use only height to distinguish vowels.
Backness
Backness refers to the horizontal tongue position during the articulation of a vowel relative to the back of the mouth. In front vowels, such as [i], the tongue is positioned forward in the mouth, whereas in back vowels, such as [u], the tongue is positioned towards the back of the mouth. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies five different degrees of vowel backness, although no known language distinguishes all five:
front vowel near-front vowel central vowel near-back vowel back vowelThe highest number of contrastive degrees of backness is 3. In most languages, roundedness is a reinforcing feature of mid to high back vowels, and not distinctive. However, some languages treat roundedness and backness separately, such as French and German (with front rounded vowels), most Uralic languages (Estonian has a rounding contrast for /o/ and front vowels), Turkic languages (with an unrounded /u/), Vietnamese (with back unrounded vowels), and Korean (with a contrast in both front and back vowels).
Nonetheless, even in languages such as German and Vietnamese, there is usually some phonetic correlation between rounding and backness: front rounded vowels tend to be less front than front unrounded vowels, and back unrounded vowels tend to be less back than back rounded vowels. That is, the placement of unrounded vowels to the left of rounded vowels on the IPA vowel chart is reflective of their typical position. (See Vowel roundedness for illustrations.) Swedish and Norwegian are two of the few languages where this feature is contrastive, having both protruded-lip and compressed-lip high front vowels. An oral vowel is a vowel in which all air escapes through the mouth.
Phonation
Voicing describes whether the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation of a vowel. Most languages only have voiced vowels, but several Native American languages, such as Cheyenne and Totonac, contrast voiced and devoiced vowels.
Modal voice, creaky voice, and breathy voice (murmured vowels) are phonation types that are used contrastively in some languages. in the Mon language, vowels pronounced in the high tone are also produced with creaky voice.
Secondary narrowings in the vocal tract
Pharyngealized vowels occur in some languages;
Rhotic vowels
Rhotic vowels are the "R-colored vowels" of English and a few other languages.
Unlike the other features of vowel quality, tenseness is only applicable to the few languages that have this opposition (mainly Germanic languages, e.g. English), whereas the vowels of the other languages (e.g.
In most Germanic languages, lax vowels can only occur in closed syllables. Therefore, they are also known as checked vowels, whereas the tense vowels are called free vowels since they can occur in any kind of syllable. The different vowel qualities are realized in acoustic analyses of vowels by the relative values of the formants, acoustic resonances of the vocal tract which show up as dark bands on a spectrogram.
The first formant, abbreviated "F1", corresponds to vowel openness (vowel height). Open vowels have high F1 frequencies while close vowels have low F1 frequencies, as can be seen at right: The [i] and [u] have similar low first formants, whereas [ɑ] has a higher formant. Back vowels have low F2 frequencies while front vowels have high F2 frequencies. This is very clear at right, where the front vowel [i] has a much higher F2 frequency than the other two vowels. (This dimension is usually called 'backness' rather than 'frontness', but the term 'backness' can be counterintuitive when discussing formants.)
R-colored vowels are characterized by lowered F3 values.
Rounding is generally realized by a complex relationship between F2 and F3 that tends to reinforce vowel backness. One effect of this is that back vowels are most commonly rounded while front vowels are most commonly unrounded; another is that rounded vowels tend to plot to the right of unrounded vowels in vowel charts.
Prosody and intonation
The features of vowel prosody are often described independently from vowel quality. The features of vowel prosody are usually considered not to apply to the vowel itself, but to the syllable, as some languages do not contrast vowel length separately from syllable length. In tonal languages, in most cases the tone of a syllable is carried by the vowel, meaning that the relative pitch or the pitch contour that marks the tone is superimposed on the vowel. If the syllable has a falling tone, then the pitch of the vowel will fall from high to low over the course of uttering the vowel. The Mixe language has a three-way contrast among short, half-long, and long vowels, and this has been reported for a few other languages, though not always as a phonemic distinction.
It should be noted that the length of the vowel is a grammatical abstraction, and there may be more phonologically distinctive lengths. For example in the word intensity, the vowel represented by the letter 'e' is stressed, so it is longer and pronounced with a higher pitch and intensity than the other vowels.
Pronunciation in English
| Close Unrounded vowels: | Close Rounded vowels: |
| The Front [i] is pronounced as in beet (RP, GA, AuE, NZE). | |
| Near-close Unrounded vowels: | Near-close Rounded vowels: |
| Near-front [ɪ]: bit (RP, GA, AuE, NZE). | |
| Schwa vowel: | |
| Schwa [ə]: about, synonym, Rosa. | |
| Close-mid Unrounded vowels: | Close-mid Rounded vowels: |
| Front [e]: play (RP), bait (CaE), bed (AuE, NZE). | |
| Open-mid Unrounded vowels: | Open-mid Rounded vowels: |
| Front [ɛ]: bed (GA), fat (AuE, NZE). | |
| Near-open Unrounded vowels: | Near-open Rounded vowels: |
| Front [æ]: fat (RP, GA, AuE, NZE). | |
| Open Unrounded vowels: | Open Rounded vowels: |
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Front [a]: lie, how (GA, RP), cut, cart (AuE, NZE),
bat (CaE, NE, SE), stock (NCVS), star, father (BA). |
Monophthongs, diphthongs, triphthongs
A vowel sound whose quality doesn't change over the duration of the vowel is called a monophthong. A vowel sound that glides from one quality to another is called a diphthong, and a vowel sound that glides between three qualities is a triphthong.
All languages have monophthongs and many languages have diphthongs, but triphthongs or vowel sounds with even more target qualities are relatively rare cross-linguistically. English has all three types: the vowel sound in hit is a monophthong [ɪ], the vowel sound in boy is in most dialects a diphthong [ɔɪ], and the vowel sounds of, flower (BrE [aʊə] AmE [aʊɚ]) form a triphthong (disyllabic in the latter cases), although the particular qualities vary by dialect.
In phonology, diphthongs and triphthongs are distinguished from sequences of monophthongs by whether the vowel sound may be analyzed into different phonemes or not. For example, the vowel sounds in a two-syllable pronunciation of the word flower (BrE [flaʊə] AmE [flaʊɚ]) phonetically form a disyllabic triphthong, but are phonologically a sequence of a diphthong (represented by the letters <ow>) and a monophthong (represented by the letters <er>).
Vowels in languages
The semantic significance of vowels varies widely depending on the language. In some languages, particularly Semitic languages, vowels mostly serve to denote inflections. In fact, the alphabets used to write the Semitic languages, such as the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet, do not ordinarily mark all the vowels. Although it is possible to construct simple English sentences that can be understood without written vowels (cn y rd ths?), extended passages of English lacking written vowels are difficult if not impossible to completely understand (consider dd, which could be any of add, aided, dad, dada, dead, deed, did, died, dodo, dud, dude, eddie, iodide, or odd).
In most languages, vowels are an unchangeable part of the words, as in English man vs. Vowels are especially important to the structures of words in languages that have very few consonants (like Polynesian languages such as Maori and Hawaiian), and in languages whose inventories of vowels are larger than their inventories of consonants.
Vowel systems
Most languages have 3–7 vowels, the following 5-vowel system being the most common:
| /i/ | /u/ |
| /e/ | /o/ |
| /a/ | |
This configuration is often thought to be particularly stable because it makes efficient use of the vowel space, in that slight variations in one vowel are not confused for another vowel.
All known languages have at least two vowels: Abxaz, Ubykh, Margi, Eastern Arrernte, and perhaps some of the Ndu languages contrast only two vowels: /a/ and /ɨ/ in the case of Margi, and /a/ and /ə/ for the others, with significant allophony. There have been proposals to reduce the three-vowel inventory of Kabardian to two, one, or even zero vowels (in which case all phonetic vowels would be epenthetic), but most linguists do not believe such analyses are workable.
A fair number of Native American languages, such as Nahuatl and Navajo, have vowel systems that lack /u/, but there is no known language that lacks some form of a. At the other end of the spectrum, languages with more than twelve vowels are uncommon, although some widely-spoken languages have large vowel inventories, particularly Germanic languages. For example, English has 14–20 vowels (including diphthongs) depending on dialect, and Swedish has 17 distinct vowel qualities in the height-backness-roundedness spectrum, although these also involve a length contrast, and the long vowels have diphthongized allophones. Some Norwegian dialects (in the municipalities Tynset and Alvdal in Hedmark county) have 14 standard vowels (and in addition comes length contrast and diphtongs, which give a total of 28 distinct vowel qualities). French has 16 vowel qualities, including nasals, and the previously-mentioned Sedang has 24 distinct monophthongs, which it achieves by contrasting phonation on seven vowel qualities. Ju/’hoan uses phonation and nasalization with five vowel qualities to achieve approximately 40 vowels, most of which may in addition occur both long and short.
Written vowels
The name "vowel" is often used for the symbols used for representing vowel sounds in a language's writing system, particularly if the language uses an alphabet. Some languages using the Latin alphabet may use other letters to represent vowel sounds: for example, in Welsh, the letter W stands for [u] or [ʊ], while in Creek the letter V stands for [ə].
There is not necessarily a direct one-to-one correspondence between the vowel sounds of a language and the vowel letters. Many languages that use a form of the Latin alphabet have more vowel sounds than can be represented by the standard set of five vowel letters. In the case of English, the five primary vowel letters can represent a variety of vowel sounds.
Notice "conventional" vowel letters functioning in actual vocabulary, as they take their role in representing unique sounds in each word: "a" ask, broad, along, any, apex, aisle, war, beauty, aeon, all, learn;
Other languages cope with the limitation in the number of Latin vowel letters in similar ways. Many languages, like English, make extensive use of combinations of vowel letters to represent various sounds. Other languages use vowel letters with modifications, e.g. Ä in Finnish, or add diacritical marks to vowels, such as accents or umlauts, to represent the variety of possible vowel sounds. Some languages have also constructed additional vowel letters by modifying the standard Latin vowels in other ways, such as æ or ø that are found in some of the Scandinavian languages. The International Phonetic Alphabet has a set of 28 symbols to represent the range of basic vowel qualities, and a further set of diacritics to denote variations from the basic vowel.
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