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A vowel is a
syllabic Syllabic may refer to: *Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words **Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable *Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables *Abugida, writing system ...
speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the
vocal tract The vocal tract is the cavity in human bodies and in animals where the sound produced at the sound source ( larynx in mammals; syrinx in birds) is filtered. In birds it consists of the trachea, the syrinx, the oral cavity, the upper part of th ...
. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
. Vowels vary in quality, in
loudness In acoustics, loudness is the subjective perception of sound pressure. More formally, it is defined as, "That attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which sounds can be ordered on a scale extending from quiet to loud". The relation of ph ...
and also in quantity (length). They are usually
voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...
and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and
stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
. The word ''vowel'' comes from the
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
word , meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). In English, the word ''vowel'' is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them (a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y).


Definition

There are two complementary definitions of vowel, one
phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
and the other
phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
. *In the
phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...
definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
"ah" or "oh" , produced with an open
vocal tract The vocal tract is the cavity in human bodies and in animals where the sound produced at the sound source ( larynx in mammals; syrinx in birds) is filtered. In birds it consists of the trachea, the syrinx, the oral cavity, the upper part of th ...
; it is median (the air escapes along the middle of the tongue), oral (at least some of the airflow must escape through the mouth),
frictionless Frictionless can refer to: * Frictionless market * Frictionless continuant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent ...
and
continuant In phonetics, a continuant is a speech sound produced without a complete closure in the oral cavity, namely fricatives, approximants, vowels, and trills. While vowels are included in continuants, the term is often reserved for consonant sound ...
. There is no significant build-up of air pressure at any point above the
glottis The glottis is the opening between the vocal folds (the rima glottidis). The glottis is crucial in producing vowels and voiced consonants. Etymology From Ancient Greek ''γλωττίς'' (glōttís), derived from ''γλῶττα'' (glôtta), v ...
. This contrasts with
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
s, such as the English "sh" , which have a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. *In the phonological definition, a vowel is defined as
syllabic Syllabic may refer to: *Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words **Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable *Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables *Abugida, writing system ...
, the sound that forms the peak of a syllable. A phonetically equivalent but non-syllabic sound is a
semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel, glide or semiconsonant is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the c ...
. In
oral language A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a si ...
s, phonetic vowels normally form the peak (nucleus) of many or all syllables, whereas
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
s form the
onset Onset may refer to: * Onset (audio), the beginning of a musical note or sound * Onset, Massachusetts, village in the United States **Onset Island (Massachusetts), a small island located at the western end of the Cape Cod Canal * Interonset interva ...
and (in languages that have them)
coda Coda or CODA may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * Movie coda, a post-credits scene * ''Coda'' (1987 film), an Australian horror film about a serial killer, made for television *''Coda'', a 2017 American experimental film from Na ...
. Some languages allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the
syllabic Syllabic may refer to: *Syllable, a unit of speech sound, considered the building block of words **Syllabic consonant, a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable *Syllabary, writing system using symbols for syllables *Abugida, writing system ...
(i.e., vocalic) ''l'' in the English word ''table'' (when not considered to have a weak vowel sound: ) or the syllabic ''r'' in the
Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...
word ''vrt'' "garden". The phonetic definition of "vowel" (i.e. a sound produced with no constriction in the vocal tract) does not always match the phonological definition (i.e. a sound that forms the peak of a syllable). The
approximant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce ...
s and 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 In phonetics, an r-colored or rhotic vowel (also called a retroflex vowel, vocalic r, or a rhotacized vowel) is a vowel that is modified in a way that results in a lowering in frequency of the third formant. R-colored vowels can be articulate ...
or a syllabic consonant . The American linguist
Kenneth Pike Kenneth Lee Pike (June 9, 1912 – December 31, 2000) was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics, the coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic" and the developer of the constructed language ...
(1943) suggested the terms "vocoid" for a phonetic vowel and "vowel" for a phonological vowel, so using this terminology, and are classified as vocoids but not vowels. 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. Nonetheless, the phonetic and phonemic definitions would still conflict for the syllabic /l/ in ''table'' or the syllabic nasals in ''button'' and ''rhythm''.


Articulation

The traditional view of vowel production, reflected for example in the terminology and presentation of 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 standardized representation ...
, is one of articulatory features that determine a vowel's ''quality'' as distinguishing it from other vowels. Daniel Jones developed the
cardinal vowel Cardinal vowels are a set of reference vowels used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages. They are classified depending on the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth, how far forward or back is the highest po ...
system to describe vowels in terms of the features of tongue ''height'' (vertical dimension), tongue ''backness'' (horizontal dimension) and ''roundedness'' (lip articulation). These three parameters are indicated in the schematic quadrilateral IPA
vowel diagram A vowel diagram or vowel chart is a schematic arrangement of the vowels. Depending on the particular language being discussed, it can take the form of a triangle or a quadrilateral. Vertical position on the diagram denotes the vowel closeness, ...
on the right. There are additional features of vowel quality, such as the
velum Velum may refer to: Human anatomy * Superior medullary velum, anterior medullary velum or valve of Vieussens, white matter, in the brain, which stretches between the superior cerebellar peduncles ** Frenulum of superior medullary velum, a slightl ...
position (nasality), type of vocal fold vibration (phonation), and tongue root position. This conception of vowel articulation has been known to be inaccurate since 1928. Peter Ladefoged has said that "early phoneticians... thought they were describing the highest point of the tongue, but they were not. They were actually describing formant frequencies." (See below.) The IPA ''Handbook'' concedes that "the vowel quadrilateral must be regarded as an abstraction and not a direct mapping of tongue position." Nonetheless, the concept that vowel qualities are determined primarily by tongue position and lip rounding continues to be used in pedagogy, as it provides an intuitive explanation of how vowels are distinguished.


Height

Theoretically, vowel height refers to the vertical position of either the tongue or the jaw (depending on the model) relative to either the roof of the mouth or the aperture of the jaw. In practice, however, it refers to the first
formant In speech science and phonetics, a formant is the broad spectral maximum that results from an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract. In acoustics, a formant is usually defined as a broad peak, or local maximum, in the spectrum. For harmoni ...
(lowest resonance of the voice), abbreviated F1, which is associated with the height of the tongue. In close vowels, also known as high vowels, such as and , the first formant is consistent with the tongue being positioned close to the palate, high in the mouth, whereas in open vowels, also known as low vowels, such as , F1 is consistent with the jaw being open and the tongue being positioned low in the mouth. Height is defined by the inverse of the F1 value: the higher the frequency of the first formant, the lower (more open) the vowel. In
John Elsing John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second E ...
's usage, where fronted vowels are distinguished in height by the position of the jaw rather than the tongue, only the terms 'open' and 'close' are used, as 'high' and 'low' refer to the position of the tongue. 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 standardized representation ...
defines seven degrees of vowel height, but no language is known to distinguish all of them without distinguishing another attribute: * close (high) * near-close (near-high) *
close-mid A close-mid vowel (also mid-close vowel, high-mid vowel, mid-high vowel or half-close vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned one ...
(high-mid) * mid (true-mid) *
open-mid An open-mid vowel (also mid-open vowel, low-mid vowel, mid-low vowel or half-open vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned one thi ...
(low-mid) * near-open (near-low) *
open Open or OPEN may refer to: Music * Open (band), Australian pop/rock band * The Open (band), English indie rock band * Open (Blues Image album), ''Open'' (Blues Image album), 1969 * Open (Gotthard album), ''Open'' (Gotthard album), 1999 * Open (C ...
(low) The letters are typically used for either close-mid or true-mid vowels. However, if more precision is required, true-mid vowels may be written with a lowering diacritic . The
Kensiu language Kensiu (Kensiw) is an Austro-asiatic language of the Jahaic (Northern Aslian) subbranch. It is spoken by a small community of 300 in Yala Province in southern Thailand and also reportedly by a community of approximately 300 speakers in Wester ...
, spoken in Malaysia and Thailand, is highly unusual in that it contrasts true-mid with close-mid and open-mid vowels, without any difference in other parameters like backness or roundness. It appears that some varieties of
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
have five vowel heights that contrast independently of length or other parameters. The Bavarian dialect of Amstetten has thirteen long vowels, which can be analyzed as distinguishing five heights (close, close-mid, mid, open-mid and open) each among the front unrounded, front rounded, and back rounded vowels as well as an open central vowel, for a total of five vowel heights: . No other language is known to contrast more than four degrees of vowel height. The parameter of vowel height appears to be the primary cross-linguistic feature of vowels in that all
spoken language A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a si ...
s that have been researched till now use height as a contrastive feature. No other parameter, even backness or rounding (see below), is used in all languages. Some languages have
vertical vowel system A vertical vowel system is the system of vowels in a language that requires only vowel height to phonemically distinguish vowels. Theoretically, rounding, frontness and backness could also be used in one-dimensional vowel systems; however, ' ...
s in which at least at a phonemic level, only height is used to distinguish vowels.


Backness

Vowel backness is named for the position of the tongue during the articulation of a vowel relative to the back of the mouth. As with vowel height, however, it is ''defined'' by a formant of the voice, in this case the second, F2, not by the position of the tongue. In front vowels, such as , the frequency of F2 is relatively high, which generally corresponds to a position of the tongue forward in the mouth, whereas in back vowels, such as , F2 is low, consistent with the tongue being positioned towards the back of the mouth. 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 standardized representation ...
defines five degrees of vowel backness: * front * near-front *
central Central is an adjective usually referring to being in the center of some place or (mathematical) object. Central may also refer to: Directions and generalised locations * Central Africa, a region in the centre of Africa continent, also known a ...
* near-back * back To them may be added front-central and back-central, corresponding to the vertical lines separating central from front and back vowel spaces in several IPA diagrams. However, ''front-central'' and ''back-central'' may also be used as terms synonymous with ''near-front'' and ''near-back''. No language is known to contrast more than three degrees of backness nor is there a language that contrasts front with near-front vowels nor back with near-back ones. Although some English dialects have vowels at five degrees of backness, there is no known language that distinguishes five degrees of backness without additional differences in height or rounding.


Roundedness

Roundedness In phonetics, vowel roundedness is the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. It is labialization of a vowel. When a ''rounded'' vowel is pronounced, the lips form a circular opening, and ''unrounded'' vowels are pr ...
is named after the rounding of the lips in some vowels. Because lip rounding is easily visible, vowels may be commonly identified as rounded based on the articulation of the lips. Acoustically, rounded vowels are identified chiefly by a decrease in F2, although F1 is also slightly decreased. In most languages, roundedness is a reinforcing feature of mid to high back vowels rather than a distinctive feature. Usually, the higher a back vowel, the more intense is the rounding. However, in some languages, roundedness is independent from backness, such as French and German (with front rounded vowels), most
Uralic languages The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian ...
(
Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also * ...
has a rounding contrast for and front vowels),
Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turki ...
(with a rounding distinction for front vowels and ), and Vietnamese with back unrounded vowels. Nonetheless, even in those languages there is usually some phonetic correlation between rounding and backness: front rounded vowels tend to be more front-central than front, and back unrounded vowels tend to be more back-central than back. Thus, the placement of unrounded vowels to the left of rounded vowels on the IPA vowel chart is reflective of their position in formant space. Different kinds of
labialization Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involv ...
are possible. In mid to high rounded back vowels the lips are generally protruded ("pursed") outward, a phenomenon known as ''endolabial rounding'' because the insides of the lips are visible, whereas in mid to high rounded front vowels the lips are generally "compressed" with the margins of the lips pulled in and drawn towards each other, a phenomenon known as ''exolabial rounding.'' However, not all languages follow that pattern.
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
, for example, is an exolabial (compressed) back vowel, and sounds quite different from an English endolabial .
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
and
Norwegian Norwegian, Norwayan, or Norsk may refer to: *Something of, from, or related to Norway, a country in northwestern Europe * Norwegians, both a nation and an ethnic group native to Norway * Demographics of Norway *The Norwegian language, including ...
are the only two known languages in which the feature is contrastive; they have both exo- and endo-labial close front vowels and close central vowels, respectively. In many phonetic treatments, both are considered types of rounding, but some phoneticians do not believe that these are subsets of a single phenomenon and posit instead three independent features of ''rounded'' (endolabial) and ''compressed'' (exolabial) and unrounded. The lip position of unrounded vowels may also be classified separately as ''spread'' and ''neutral'' (neither rounded nor spread). Others distinguish compressed rounded vowels, in which the corners of the mouth are drawn together, from compressed unrounded vowels, in which the lips are compressed but the corners remain apart as in spread vowels.


Front, raised and retracted

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. Vowels may instead be characterized by the three directions of movement of the tongue from its neutral position: front (forward), raised (upward and back), and retracted (downward and back). Front vowels ( and, to a lesser extent , etc.), can be secondarily qualified as close or open, as in the traditional conception, but this refers to jaw rather than tongue position. In addition, rather than there being a unitary category of back vowels, the regrouping posits raised vowels, where the body of the tongue approaches the velum (], etc.), and retracted vowels, where the root of the tongue approaches the pharynx (, etc.): * front * raised * retracted Membership in these categories is scalar, with the mid-central vowels being marginal to any category.


Nasalization

Nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internation ...
occurs when air escapes through the nose. Vowels are often nasalised under the influence of neighbouring nasal consonants, as in
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
''hand'' . ''Nasalised vowels'', however, should not be confused with ''nasal vowels''. The latter refers to vowels that are distinct from their oral counterparts, as in
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
vs. . In
nasal vowel A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are produced with ...
s, the
velum Velum may refer to: Human anatomy * Superior medullary velum, anterior medullary velum or valve of Vieussens, white matter, in the brain, which stretches between the superior cerebellar peduncles ** Frenulum of superior medullary velum, a slightl ...
is lowered, and some air travels through the nasal cavity as well as the mouth. An oral vowel is a vowel in which all air escapes through the mouth. Polish and
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
also contrast nasal and oral vowels.


Phonation

Voicing describes whether the
vocal cords In humans, vocal cords, also known as vocal folds or voice reeds, are folds of throat tissues that are key in creating sounds through vocalization. The size of vocal cords affects the pitch of voice. Open when breathing and vibrating for speec ...
are vibrating during the articulation of a vowel. Most languages have only voiced vowels, but several
Native American languages Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large numbe ...
, such as
Cheyenne The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. Their Cheyenne language belongs to the Algonquian language family. Today, the Cheyenne people are split into two federally recognized nations: the Southern Cheyenne, who are enr ...
and
Totonac The Totonac are an indigenous people of Mexico who reside in the states of Veracruz, Puebla, and Hidalgo. They are one of the possible builders of the pre-Columbian city of El Tajín, and further maintained quarters in Teotihuacán (a city ...
, contrast voiced and devoiced vowels. Vowels are devoiced in whispered speech. In Japanese and in
Quebec French Quebec French (french: français québécois ), also known as Québécois French, is the predominant variety of the French language spoken in Canada. It is the dominant language of the province of Quebec, used in everyday communication, in educ ...
, vowels that are between voiceless consonants are often devoiced. Modal voice,
creaky voice In linguistics, creaky voice (sometimes called laryngealisation, pulse phonation, vocal fry, or glottal fry) refers to a low, scratchy sound that occupies the vocal range below the common vocal register. It is a special kind of phonation in which ...
, and
breathy voice Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like ...
(murmured vowels) are
phonation The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defin ...
types that are used contrastively in some languages. Often, they co-occur with tone or stress distinctions; in the
Mon language The Mon language (, mnw, ဘာသာမန်, links=no, (Mon-Thai ဘာသာမည်) ; my, မွန်ဘာသာ; th, ภาษามอญ; formerly known as Peguan and Talaing) is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mon peop ...
, vowels pronounced in the high tone are also produced with creaky voice. In such cases, it can be unclear whether it is the tone, the voicing type, or the pairing of the two that is being used for phonemic contrast. The combination of phonetic cues (phonation, tone, stress) is known as ''register'' or ''register complex''.


Tenseness

Tenseness In phonology, tenseness or tensing is, most broadly, the pronunciation of a sound with greater muscular effort or constriction than is typical. More specifically, tenseness is the pronunciation of a vowel with less centralization (i.e. either mo ...
is used to describe the opposition of ''tense vowels'' vs. ''lax vowels''. This opposition has traditionally been thought to be a result of greater muscular tension, though phonetic experiments have repeatedly failed to show this. Unlike the other features of vowel quality, tenseness is only applicable to the few languages that have this opposition (mainly
Germanic language The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, E ...
s, e.g.
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
), whereas the vowels of the other languages (e.g.
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
) cannot be described with respect to tenseness in any meaningful way. One may distinguish the English tense vs. lax vowels roughly, with its spelling. Tense vowels usually occur in words with the final
silent e In English orthography, many words feature a silent (single, final, non-syllabic ‘e’), most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle En ...
, as in ''mate''. Lax vowels occur in words without the silent e, such as ''mat''. In
American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States and in most circumstances ...
, lax vowels do not appear in stressed open syllables. In traditional grammar, ''long vowels'' vs. ''short vowels'' are more commonly used, compared to ''tense'' and ''lax''. The two sets of terms are used interchangeably by some because the features are concomitant in some varieties of English. In most
Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...
, lax vowels can only occur in
closed syllables A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
. 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.


Tongue root position

Advanced tongue root (ATR) is a feature common across much of Africa, the
Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest (sometimes Cascadia, or simply abbreviated as PNW) is a geographic region in western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Thou ...
, and scattered other languages such as Modern Mongolian. The contrast between advanced and retracted tongue root resembles the tense-lax contrast acoustically, but they are articulated differently. Those vowels involve noticeable tension in the vocal tract.


Secondary narrowings in the vocal tract

Pharyngealized vowels occur in some languages like Sedang and the
Tungusic languages The Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu-Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the doz ...
. Pharyngealisation is similar in articulation to retracted tongue root but is acoustically distinct. A stronger degree of pharyngealisation occurs in the
Northeast Caucasian languages The Northeast Caucasian languages, also called East Caucasian, Nakh-Daghestani or ''Vainakh-Daghestani'', is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as in ...
and the
Khoisan languages The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of ...
. They might be called epiglottalized since the primary constriction is at the tip of the epiglottis. The greatest degree of pharyngealisation is found in the
strident vowel Strident vowels (also called sphincteric vowels) are strongly pharyngealized vowels accompanied by an (ary)epiglottal trill, with the larynx being raised and the pharynx constricted. Either the epiglottis or the arytenoid cartilages thus vibrate ...
s of the Khoisan languages, where the
larynx The larynx (), commonly called the voice box, is an organ in the top of the neck involved in breathing, producing sound and protecting the trachea against food aspiration. The opening of larynx into pharynx known as the laryngeal inlet is about ...
is raised, and the pharynx constricted, so that either the epiglottis or the
arytenoid cartilage The arytenoid cartilages () are a pair of small three-sided pyramids which form part of the larynx. They are the site of attachment of the vocal cords. Each is pyramidal or ladle-shaped and has three surfaces, a base, and an apex. The arytenoid ...
s vibrate instead of the vocal cords. Note that the terms ''pharyngealized'', ''epiglottalized'', ''strident'', and ''sphincteric'' are sometimes used interchangeably.


Rhotic vowels

Rhotic vowels are the "R-colored vowels" of American English and a few other languages.


Reduced vowels

Some languages, such as English and Russian, have what are called 'reduced', 'weak' or 'obscure' vowels in some unstressed positions. These do not correspond one-to-one with the vowel sounds that occur in stressed position (so-called 'full' vowels), and they tend to be mid-centralized in comparison, as well as having reduced rounding or spreading. The IPA has long provided two letters for obscure vowels, mid and lower , neither of which are defined for rounding. Dialects of English may have up to four phonemic reduced vowels: , , and higher unrounded and rounded . (The non-IPA letters and may be used for the latter to avoid confusion with the clearly defined values of IPA letters like and , which are also seen, since the IPA only provides for two reduced vowels.)


Acoustics

The acoustics of vowels are fairly well understood. The different vowel qualities are realized in acoustic analyses of vowels by the relative values of the
formant In speech science and phonetics, a formant is the broad spectral maximum that results from an acoustic resonance of the human vocal tract. In acoustics, a formant is usually defined as a broad peak, or local maximum, in the spectrum. For harmoni ...
s, acoustic
resonance Resonance describes the phenomenon of increased amplitude that occurs when the frequency of an applied periodic force (or a Fourier component of it) is equal or close to a natural frequency of the system on which it acts. When an oscil ...
s of the vocal tract which show up as dark bands on a
spectrogram A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. When applied to an audio signal, spectrograms are sometimes called sonographs, voiceprints, or voicegrams. When the data are represen ...
. The vocal tract acts as a
resonant cavity A resonator is a device or system that exhibits resonance or resonant behavior. That is, it naturally oscillates with greater amplitude at some frequencies, called resonant frequencies, than at other frequencies. The oscillations in a resonato ...
, and the position of the jaw, lips, and tongue affect the parameters of the resonant cavity, resulting in different formant values. The acoustics of vowels can be visualized using spectrograms, which display the acoustic energy at each frequency, and how this changes with time. The first formant, abbreviated "F1", corresponds to vowel openness (vowel height).
Open vowel An open vowel is a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels (in U.S. terminology ) in reference to the low position of the tongue. In the cont ...
s have high F1 frequencies, while
close vowel A close vowel, also known as a high vowel (in U.S. terminology), is any in a class of vowel sounds used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of th ...
s have low F1 frequencies, as can be seen in the accompanying spectrogram: The and have similar low first formants, whereas has a higher formant. The second formant, F2, corresponds to vowel frontness.
Back vowel A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be c ...
s have low F2 frequencies, while
front vowel A front vowel is a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages, its defining characteristic being that the highest point of the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would otherw ...
s have high F2 frequencies. This is very clear in the spectrogram, where the front vowel has a much higher F2 frequency than the other two vowels. However, in open vowels, the high F1 frequency forces a rise in the F2 frequency as well, so an alternative measure of frontness is the ''difference'' between the first and second formants. For this reason, some people prefer to plot as F1 vs. F2 – F1. (This dimension is usually called 'backness' rather than 'frontness', but the term 'backness' can be counterintuitive when discussing formants.) In the third edition of his textbook,
Peter Ladefoged Peter Nielsen Ladefoged ( , ; 17 September 1925 – 24 January 2006) was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book '' A Cour ...
recommended using plots of F1 against F2 – F1 to represent vowel quality. However, in the fourth edition, he changed to adopt a simple plot of F1 against F2, and this simple plot of F1 against F2 was maintained for the fifth (and final) edition of the book. Katrina Hayward compares the two types of plots and concludes that plotting of F1 against F2 – F1 "is not very satisfactory because of its effect on the placing of the central vowels", so she also recommends use of a simple plot of F1 against F2. In fact, this kind of plot of F1 against F2 has been used by analysts to show the quality of the vowels in a wide range of languages, including RP, the Queen's English, American English, Singapore English, Brunei English, North Frisian, Turkish Kabardian, and various indigenous Australian languages.
R-colored vowel In phonetics, an r-colored or rhotic vowel (also called a retroflex vowel, vocalic r, or a rhotacized vowel) is a vowel that is modified in a way that results in a lowering in frequency of the third formant. R-colored vowels can be articulate ...
s are characterized by lowered F3 values. Rounding is generally realized by a decrease of F2 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. That is, there is a reason for plotting vowel pairs the way they are.


Prosody and intonation

In addition to variation in vowel quality as described above, vowels vary as a result of differences in prosody. The most important prosodic variables are pitch (
fundamental frequency The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply as the ''fundamental'', is defined as the lowest frequency of a periodic waveform. In music, the fundamental is the musical pitch of a note that is perceived as the lowest partial present. I ...
),
loudness In acoustics, loudness is the subjective perception of sound pressure. More formally, it is defined as, "That attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which sounds can be ordered on a scale extending from quiet to loud". The relation of ph ...
( intensity) and
length Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a base unit for length is chosen, from which all other units are derived. In the Inte ...
( duration). However, the features of prosody are usually considered to apply not to the vowel itself, but to the
syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...
in which the vowel occurs. In other words, the ''domain'' of prosody is the syllable, not the segment (vowel or consonant). We can list briefly the effect of prosody on the vowel component of a syllable. * Pitch: in the case of a syllable such as 'cat', the only
voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...
portion of the syllable is the vowel, so the vowel carries the pitch information. This may relate to the syllable in which it occurs, or to a larger stretch of speech to which an intonation contour belongs. In a word such as 'man', all the segments in the syllable are
sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels ar ...
and all will participate in any pitch variation. * Loudness: this variable has been traditionally associated with linguistic
stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
, though other factors are usually involved in this. Lehiste (ibid) argues that stress, or loudness, could not be associated with a single segment in a syllable independently of the rest of the syllable (p. 147). This means that vowel loudness is a concomitant of the loudness of the syllable in which it occurs. * Length: it is important to distinguish two aspects of
vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word ...
. One is the
phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
difference in length exhibited by some languages.
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
,
Finnish Finnish may refer to: * Something or someone from, or related to Finland * Culture of Finland * Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland * Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people * Finnish cuisine See also ...
, Hungarian,
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
and
Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
have a two-way phonemic contrast between short and long vowels. The
Mixe language The Mixe languages are languages of the Mixean branch of the Mixe–Zoquean language family indigenous to southern Mexico. According to a 1995 classification, there are seven of them (including one that is extinct). The four that are spoken in ...
has a three-way contrast among short, half-long, and long vowels. The other type of length variation in vowels is non-distinctive, and is the result of prosodic variation in speech: vowels tend to be lengthened when in a stressed syllable, or when utterance rate is slow.


Monophthongs, diphthongs, triphthongs

A vowel sound whose quality does not change throughout the vowel is called a
monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, wh ...
. Monophthongs are sometimes called "pure" or "stable" vowels. A vowel sound that glides from one quality to another is called a
diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...
, and a vowel sound that glides successively through 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 , the vowel sound in ''boy'' is in most dialects a diphthong , and the vowel sounds of ''flower'', , form a triphthong or disyllable, depending on the dialect. In
phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
, diphthongs and triphthongs are distinguished from sequences of monophthongs by whether the vowel sound may be analyzed into distinct
phonemes In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...
. For example, the vowel sounds in a two-syllable pronunciation of the word ''flower'' () phonetically form a disyllabic triphthong but are phonologically a sequence of a diphthong (represented by the letters ) and a monophthong (represented by the letters ). Some linguists use the terms ''diphthong'' and ''triphthong'' only in this phonemic sense.


Written vowels

The name "vowel" is often used for the symbols that represent vowel sounds in a language's
writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable fo ...
, particularly if the language uses an
alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
. In writing systems based on the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the ...
, the letters ''A'', ''E'', ''I'', ''O'', ''U'', ''Y'', ''W'' and sometimes others can all be used to represent vowels. However, not all of these letters represent the vowels in all languages that use this writing, or even consistently within one language. Some of them, especially ''W'' and ''Y'', are also used to represent
approximant consonant Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce ...
s. Moreover, a vowel might be represented by a letter usually reserved for consonants, or a combination of letters, particularly where one letter represents several sounds at once, or vice versa; examples from English include ''igh'' in "thigh" and ''x'' in "x-ray". In addition, extensions of the Latin alphabet have such independent vowel letters as ''Ä'', ''Ö'', ''Ü'', ''Å'', ''Æ'', and ''Ø''. The phonetic values vary considerably by language, and some languages use ''I'' and ''Y'' for the consonant , e.g., initial ''I'' in
Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, an ethnic group or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance language *** Regional Ita ...
or
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
and initial ''Y'' in English. In the original Latin alphabet, there was no written distinction between ''V'' and ''U'', and the letter represented the approximant and the vowels and . In Modern
Welsh Welsh may refer to: Related to Wales * Welsh, referring or related to Wales * Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales * Welsh people People * Welsh (surname) * Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
, the letter ''W'' represents these same sounds. Similarly, in Creek, the letter ''V'' stands for . 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 English spelling, the five letters ''A'' ''E'' ''I'' ''O'' and ''U'' can represent a variety of vowel sounds, while the letter ''Y'' frequently represents vowels (as in e.g., "gym", "happy", or the diphthongs in "cry", "thyme"); ''W'' is used in representing some
diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...
s (as in "cow") and to represent a
monophthong A monophthong ( ; , ) is a pure vowel sound, one whose articulation at both beginning and end is relatively fixed, and which does not glide up or down towards a new position of articulation. The monophthongs can be contrasted with diphthongs, wh ...
in the borrowed words "" and "" (sometimes ''cruth''). Other languages cope with the limitation in the number of Latin vowel letters in similar ways. Many languages make extensive use of combinations of letters to represent various sounds. Other languages use vowel letters with modifications, such as ''ä'' in
Swedish Swedish or ' may refer to: Anything from or related to Sweden, a country in Northern Europe. Or, specifically: * Swedish language, a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Sweden and Finland ** Swedish alphabet, the official alphabet used by ...
, or add
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
al marks, like umlauts, to vowels 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 language The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is als ...
s. 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 standardized representation ...
has a set of 28 symbols representing the range of essential vowel qualities, and a further set of diacritics to denote variations from the basic vowel. The writing systems used for some languages, such as the
Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet ( he, אָלֶף־בֵּית עִבְרִי, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewi ...
and the Arabic alphabet, do not ordinarily mark all the vowels, since they are frequently unnecessary in identifying a word. Technically, these are called
abjad An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vow ...
s rather than alphabets. Although it is possible to construct English sentences that can be understood without written vowels (''cn y rd ths?''), 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''. (Note that abjads generally express some word-internal vowels and all word-initial and word-final vowels, whereby the ambiguity will be much reduced.) The
Masoretes The Masoretes ( he, בַּעֲלֵי הַמָּסוֹרָה, Baʿălēy Hammāsōrā, lit. 'Masters of the Tradition') were groups of Jewish scribe- scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries CE, based primarily i ...
devised a vowel notation system for Hebrew Jewish scripture that is still widely used, as well as the
trope Trope or tropes may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * Trope (cinema), a cinematic convention for conveying a concept * Trope (literature), a figure of speech or common literary device * Trope (music), any of a variety of different things ...
symbols used for its
cantillation Cantillation is the ritual chanting of prayers and responses. It often specifically refers to Jewish Hebrew cantillation. Cantillation sometimes refers to diacritics used in texts that are to be chanted in liturgy. Cantillation includes: * Chant ...
; both are part of
oral tradition Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication wherein knowledge, art, ideas and Culture, cultural material is received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.Jan Vansina, Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Traditio ...
and still the basis for many bible translations—Jewish and Christian.


Shifts

The differences in pronunciation of vowel letters between English and its related languages can be accounted for by the
Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through ...
. After printing was introduced to England, and therefore after spelling was more or less standardized, a series of dramatic changes in the pronunciation of the vowel phonemes did occur, and continued into recent centuries, but were not reflected in the spelling system. This has led to numerous inconsistencies in the spelling of English vowel sounds and the pronunciation of English vowel letters (and to the mispronunciation of foreign words and names by speakers of English).


Audio samples


Systems

The importance of vowels in distinguishing one word from another varies from language to language. Nearly all languages have at least three phonemic vowels, usually as in
Classical Arabic Classical Arabic ( ar, links=no, ٱلْعَرَبِيَّةُ ٱلْفُصْحَىٰ, al-ʿarabīyah al-fuṣḥā) or Quranic Arabic is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notab ...
and
Inuktitut Inuktitut (; , syllabics ; from , "person" + , "like", "in the manner of"), also Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, is one of the principal Inuit languages of Canada. It is spoken in all areas north of the tree line, including parts of the provinces o ...
, though Adyghe and many
Sepik languages The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than presented here. They tend to ha ...
have a
vertical vowel system A vertical vowel system is the system of vowels in a language that requires only vowel height to phonemically distinguish vowels. Theoretically, rounding, frontness and backness could also be used in one-dimensional vowel systems; however, ' ...
of . Very few languages have fewer, though some
Arrernte Arrernte (also spelt Aranda, etc.) is a descriptor related to a group of Aboriginal Australian peoples from Central Australia. It may refer to: * Arrernte (area), land controlled by the Arrernte Council (?) * Arrernte people, Aboriginal Australi ...
, Circassian, and
Ndu languages The Ndu languages are the best known family of the Sepik languages of East Sepik Province in northern Papua New Guinea. ''Ndu'' is the word for 'man' in the languages that make up this group. The languages were first identified as a related famil ...
have been argued to have just two, and , with being
epenthetic In phonology, epenthesis (; Greek ) means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable ('' prothesis'') or in the ending syllable (''paragoge'') or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The word ''epent ...
. It is not straightforward to say which language has the most vowels, since that depends on how they are counted. For example, long vowels, nasal vowels, and various
phonation The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defin ...
s may or may not be counted separately; indeed, it may sometimes be unclear if phonation belongs to the vowels or the consonants of a language. If such things are ignored and only vowels with dedicated IPA letters ('vowel qualities') are considered, then very few languages have more than ten. The
Germanic languages The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...
have some of the largest inventories: Standard Danish has 11 to 13 short vowels (), while the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian has been reported to have thirteen long vowels: . The situation can be quite disparate within a same family language:
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
and
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
are two closely related
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
but Spanish has only five pure vowel qualities, , while classical French has eleven: and four nasal vowels . The
Mon–Khmer languages The Austroasiatic languages , , are a large language family in Mainland Southeast Asia and South Asia. These languages are scattered throughout parts of Thailand, Laos, India, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, and southern China and are t ...
of Southeast Asia also have some large inventories, such as the eleven vowels of Vietnamese: . Wu dialects have the largest inventories of Chinese; the Jinhui dialect of Wu has also been reported to have eleven vowels: ten basic vowels, , plus restricted ; this does not count the seven nasal vowels. One of the most common vowels is ; it is nearly universal for a language to have at least one open vowel, though most dialects of English have an and a —and often an , all open vowels—but no central . Some
Tagalog Tagalog may refer to: Language * Tagalog language, a language spoken in the Philippines ** Old Tagalog, an archaic form of the language ** Batangas Tagalog, a dialect of the language * Tagalog script, the writing system historically used for Taga ...
and Cebuano speakers have rather than , and Dhangu Yolngu is described as having , without any peripheral vowels. is also extremely common, though Tehuelche has just the vowels with no close vowels. The third vowel of the Arabic-type three-vowel system, , is considerably less common. A large fraction of the languages of North America happen to have a four-vowel system without : ;
Nahuatl Nahuatl (; ), Aztec, or Mexicano is a language or, by some definitions, a group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by about Nahua peoples, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have small ...
and
Navajo The Navajo (; British English: Navaho; nv, Diné or ') are a Native Americans in the United States, Native American people of the Southwestern United States. With more than 399,494 enrolled tribal members , the Navajo Nation is the largest fe ...
are examples. In most languages, vowels serve mainly to distinguish separate
lexeme A lexeme () is a unit of lexical meaning that underlies a set of words that are related through inflection. It is a basic abstract unit of meaning, a unit of morphological analysis in linguistics that roughly corresponds to a set of forms take ...
s, rather than different inflectional forms of the same lexeme as they commonly do in the Semitic languages. For example, while English ''man'' becomes ''men'' in the plural, ''moon'' is a completely different word.


Words without vowels

In rhotic dialects of English, as in Canada and the United States, there are many words such as ''bird, learn, girl, church, worst, wyrm,
myrrh Myrrh (; from Semitic, but see '' § Etymology'') is a gum-resin extracted from a number of small, thorny tree species of the genus '' Commiphora''. Myrrh resin has been used throughout history as a perfume, incense and medicine. Myrrh m ...
'' that some phoneticians analyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic consonant . However, others analyze these words instead as having a
rhotic vowel In phonetics, an r-colored or rhotic vowel (also called a retroflex vowel, vocalic r, or a rhotacized vowel) is a vowel that is modified in a way that results in a lowering in frequency of the third formant. R-colored vowels can be articulate ...
, . The difference may be partially one of dialect. There are a few such words that are disyllabic, like '' cursor,
curtain A curtain is a piece of cloth Textile is an umbrella term that includes various fiber-based materials, including fibers, yarns, filaments, threads, different fabric types, etc. At first, the word "textiles" only referred to woven fa ...
,'' and ''
turtle Turtles are an order of reptiles known as Testudines, characterized by a special shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Cryptodira (hidden necked t ...
:'' , and (or , , and ), and even a few that are trisyllabic, at least in some accents, such as ''purpler'' , ''hurdler'' , ''gurgler'' , and ''certainer'' . The word ''and'' frequently contracts to a simple
nasal Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination: * With reference to the human nose: ** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery * ...
''’n,'' as in ''lock 'n key'' . Words such as ''will, have,'' and ''is'' regularly contract to ''’ll'' , ''’ve'' , and s'' . However, none of them are pronounced alone without vowels, so they are not phonological words.
Onomatopoeic Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...
words that can be pronounced alone, and that have no vowels or ars, include ''hmm, pst!, shh!, tsk!,'' and ''zzz''. As in other languages, onomatopoeiae stand outside the normal phonotactics of English. There are other languages that form lexical words without vowel sounds. In
Serbo-Croatian Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...
, for example, the consonants and (the difference is not written) can act as a
syllable nucleus A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological " ...
and carry rising or falling tone; examples include the tongue-twister and geographic names such as . In
Czech Czech may refer to: * Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe ** Czech language ** Czechs, the people of the area ** Czech culture ** Czech cuisine * One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus' Places * Czech, ...
and Slovak, either or can stand in for vowels: "wolf", "neck". A particularly long word without vowels is , meaning "quarter-handful", with two syllables (one for each R), or , a verb form meaning "you flipped (sth) down" (eg a marble). Whole sentences (usually tongue-twisters) can be made from such words, such as , meaning "stick a finger through your neck" (), and cs, Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh, A morel full of spots wetted from fogs, label=none. (Here has two syllables based on L; and note that the
preposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
consists of a single consonant. Only prepositions do this in Czech, and they normally link phonetically to the following word, so not really behave as vowelless words.) In Russian, there are also prepositions that consist of a single consonant letter, like russian: k, lit=to, label=none, russian: v, lit=in, label=none, and russian: s, lit=with, label=none. However, these forms are actually contractions of , , and respectively, and these forms are still used in modern Russian before words with certain consonant clusters for ease of pronunciation. In Kazakh and certain other
Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia ( Siberia), and Western Asia. The Turki ...
, words without vowel sounds may occur due to reduction of weak vowels. A common example is the Kazakh word for one: , pronounced . Among careful speakers, however, the original vowel may be preserved, and the vowels are always preserved in the orthography. In Southern
varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of mai ...
, such as
Cantonese Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding a ...
and Minnan, some monosyllabic words are made of exclusively
nasal Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination: * With reference to the human nose: ** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery * ...
s, such as Cantonese "no" and "five". Minnan also has words consisting of a consonant followed by a syllabic nasal, such as ''pn̄g'' "cooked rice". So far, all of these syllabic consonants, at least in the
lexical words In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker. ...
, have been
sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels ar ...
s, such as , , , and , which have a
voiced Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer ...
quality similar to vowels. (They can carry tone, for example.) However, there are languages with lexical words that not only contain no vowels, but contain no sonorants at all, like (non-lexical) ''shh!'' in English. These include some
Berber languages The Berber languages, also known as the Amazigh languages or Tamazight,, ber, label=Tuareg Tifinagh, ⵜⵎⵣⵗⵜ, ) are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related languages spoken by Berber commun ...
and some languages of the American
Pacific Northwest The Pacific Northwest (sometimes Cascadia, or simply abbreviated as PNW) is a geographic region in western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Thou ...
, such as
Nuxalk The Nuxalk people ( Nuxalk: ''Nuxalkmc''; pronounced )'','' also referred to as the Bella Coola, Bellacoola or Bilchula, are an Indigenous First Nation of the Pacific Northwest Coast, centred in the area in and around Bella Coola, British Co ...
. An example from the latter is "seal fat" (pronounced , as spelled), and a longer one is '' clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts''' (pronounced ) "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". (Follow the Nuxalk link for other examples.) Berber examples include "you took it off" and "you gave it". Some words may contain one or two consonants only: "be", "feed on". (In
Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
, words and syllables such as and are sometimes described as being syllabic fricatives and affricates phonemically, and , but these do have a voiced segment that carries the tone.) In the
Japonic language Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and ...
Miyako, there are words with no voiced sounds, such as 'dust', 'breast/milk', 'day', 'a comb', 'to make', 'to build', 'month', 'to cut', 'to pull'. Some analyses of Wandala is reported to have no phonemic vowels.


Words consisting of only vowels

It is not uncommon for short grammatical words to consist of only vowels, such as ''a'' and ''I'' in English. 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''. Vowel-only words of more than one syllable are generally foreign loans, such as ''ai'' (two syllables: ) for the maned sloth, or proper names, such as ''
Iowa Iowa () is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wiscon ...
'' (in some accents: ). However, vowel sequences in
hiatus Hiatus may refer to: * Hiatus (anatomy), a natural fissure in a structure * Hiatus (stratigraphy), a discontinuity in the age of strata in stratigraphy *''Hiatus'', a genus of picture-winged flies with sole member species '' Hiatus fulvipes'' * G ...
are more freely allowed in some other languages, most famously perhaps in
Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language * Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle * Black Association for Nationa ...
and Polynesian languages, but also in
Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...
and
Finnic languages The Finnic (''Fennic'') or more precisely Balto-Finnic (Balto-Fennic, Baltic Finnic, Baltic Fennic) languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7  ...
. In such languages there tends to be a larger variety of vowel-only words. 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 A mora (plural ''morae'' or ''moras''; often symbolized μ) is a basic timing unit in the phonology of some spoken languages, equal to or shorter than a syllable. For example, a short syllable such as ''ba'' consists of one mora (''monomoraic''), ...
); and in Finnish, 'intention' and 'open!' (both two syllables), although some dialects pronounce them as and . In
Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Hawaiian, and the Polynesian languages generally, have unusually large numbers of such words, such as (a small green fish), which is three syllables: . Most long words involve
reduplication In linguistics, reduplication is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word (or part of it) or even the whole word is repeated exactly or with a slight change. The classic observation on the semantics of reduplication is Edwa ...
, which is quite
productive Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Measurements of productivity are often expressed as a ratio of an aggregate output to a single input or an aggregate input used in a production proces ...
in Polynesian: 'grooves', 'breath', 'tough' (all four syllables), 'crying' (five syllables, from 'to weep'), or 'false mullet' (sp. fish, three or five syllables).


See also

*
English phonology Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system. Amon ...
*
Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the English language that took place primarily between 1400 and 1700, beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through ...
*
Inherent vowel An inherent vowel is part of an abugida (or alphasyllabary) script. It is a vowel sound which is used with each unmarked or basic consonant symbol. For example, if the Latin alphabet used 'i' as an inherent vowel, "Wikipedia" could be rendered as "W ...
*
List of phonetics topics 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 ...
*
Mater lectionis ''Matres lectionis'' (from Latin "mothers of reading", singular form: ''mater lectionis'', from he, אֵם קְרִיאָה ) are consonants that are used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing down of Semitic languages such as Arabic, ...
* Scale of vowels *
Table of vowels This table lists the vowel letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet. , , ----- ! Close back unrounded vowel , close , , back , unrounded , , 316 , , ɯ , , , ɯ , , M , , ----- ! Close back rounded vowel , close , ...
*
Vowel coalescence In phonetics and historical linguistics, fusion, or coalescence, is a sound change where two or more segments with distinctive features merge into a single segment. This can occur both on consonants and in vowels. A word like ''educate'' is o ...
*
Words without vowels A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
*
Zero consonant In orthography, a zero consonant, silent initial, or null-onset letter is a consonant letter that does not correspond to a consonant sound, but is required when a word or syllable starts with a vowel (i.e. has a null onset). Some abjads, abugidas ...


Notes


References


Bibliography

* ''Handbook of the International Phonetic Association'', 1999.
Cambridge University , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...
* Johnson, Keith, ''Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics'', second edition, 2003. Blackwell * Korhonen, Mikko. ''Koltansaamen opas'', 1973. Castreanum * Ladefoged, Peter, ''A Course in Phonetics'', fifth edition, 2006. Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth * Ladefoged, Peter, ''Elements of Acoustic Phonetics'', 1995.
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
* * Ladefoged, Peter, ''Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages'', 2000. Blackwell . * * Stevens, Kenneth N. (1998). ''Acoustic phonetics''. Current studies in linguistics (No. 30). Cambridge, MA: MIT. . * * Watt, D. and Tillotson, J. (2001). A spectrographic analysis of vowel fronting in Bradford English. ''English World-Wide'' 22:2, 269–302. Available at https://web.archive.org/web/20120412023624/http://www.abdn.ac.uk/langling/resources/Watt-Tillotson2001.pdf


External links


IPA chart
with
MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...
sound files
IPA vowel chart
with
AIFF Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was developed by Apple Inc. in 1988 based on Electronic Arts' Interchange ...
sound files
Vowel charts for several different languages and dialects measuring F1 and F2


Online examples from Ladefoged's ''Vowels and Consonants'', referenced above. {{Authority control Manner of articulation Phonetics