The close-mid central unrounded vowel, or high-mid central unrounded vowel, is a type of

vowel 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 (len ...

sound used in some spoken

language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

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 standardized representation ...

that represents this sound is . This is a mirrored letter e and should not be confused with the

schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...

, which is a turned e. It was added to the IPA in 1993; before that, this vowel was transcribed (Latin small letter e with umlaut, not Cyrillic small letter yo). Certain older sourcesFor example . transcribe this vowel . The letter may be used with a lowering diacritic , to denote the mid central unrounded vowel. Conversely, , the symbol for the mid central vowel may be used with a raising diacritic to denote the close-mid central unrounded vowel, although that is more accurately written with an additional unrounding diacritic to explicitly denote the lack of rounding (the canonical value of IPA is undefined for rounding).

Features

Occurrence

Notes

References

External links