The close central unrounded vowel, or high central unrounded vowel, is a type of
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
sound used in some
language
Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...
s. The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...
that represents this sound is , namely the lower-case
letter ''i'' with a horizontal bar. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as
barred i.
Occasionally, this vowel is transcribed (
centralized ) or (centralized ).
The close central unrounded vowel is the vocalic equivalent of the rare
post-palatal approximant .
Some languages feature the , which is slightly lower. It is most often transcribed in IPA with and , but other transcriptions such as and are also possible. In many British dictionaries, this vowel has been transcribed , which captures its height; in the
American tradition it is more often , which captures its centrality, or , which captures both. is also used in a number of other publications, such as ''Accents of English'' by
John C. Wells
John Christopher Wells (born 11 March 1939) is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. He is known for ...
. In the third edition of the ''
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...
'', represents variation between and .
Features
Occurrence
is uncommon as a
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
in
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia (e. ...
, occurring most commonly in some
Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavs, Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic language, Proto- ...
, such as
Belarusian and
Russian
Russian(s) may refer to:
*Russians (), an ethnic group of the East Slavic peoples, primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries
*A citizen of Russia
*Russian language, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages
*''The Russians'', a b ...
(see
Ñ‹). However, it is very common as a separate phoneme in the indigenous languages of the
Americas
The Americas, sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North America and South America.''Webster's New World College Dictionary'', 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Cleveland, Ohio. When viewed as a sing ...
and is often in phonemic contrast with other close vowels such as and both in modern living languages as well as reconstructed
proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unatte ...
s (such as
Proto-Uto-Aztecan). Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark identify the presence of this vowel phoneme as an
areal feature
In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a common ancestor or proto-language. An areal feature is contrasted with genetic relatio ...
of a
Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El S ...
n
Sprachbund
A sprachbund (, from , 'language federation'), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. Th ...
(although that is not a defining feature of the entire area).
The sound of
Polish is often represented as , but actually it is a
close-mid advanced central unrounded vowel, more narrowly transcribed . Similarly, European Portuguese unstressed , often represented as , is actually a
near-close near-back unrounded vowel, more narrowly transcribed using ''ad hoc'' symbols such as (
mid-centralized), (
fronted) and (
less rounded, i.e. unrounded).
See also
*
Index of phonetics articles
A
* Acoustic phonetics
* Active articulator
* Affricate
* Airstream mechanism
* Alexander John Ellis
* Alexander Melville Bell
* Alfred C. Gimson
* Allophone
* Alveolar approximant ()
* Alveolar click ()
* Alveolar consonant
* Alveolar ej ...
Notes
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External links
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{{IPA navigation
Close vowels
Central vowels
Unrounded vowels