A front rounded vowel is a particular 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 ...
that is both
front and
rounded.
The front rounded vowels defined by the IPA include:
* , a
close front rounded vowel
The close front rounded vowel, or high front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is /y/, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is y. Ac ...
(or "high front rounded vowel")
* , a
near-close front rounded vowel
The near-close front rounded vowel, or near-high front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol ...
(or "near-high ...")
* , a
close-mid front rounded vowel
The close-mid front rounded vowel, or high-mid front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages.
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is , a lowercase letter o with a diagonal s ...
(or "high-mid ...")
* , a
mid front rounded vowel
* , an
open-mid front rounded vowel
The open-mid front rounded vowel, or low-mid front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is . The symbol œ is a lowercase ligatur ...
(or "low-mid ...")
* , an
open front rounded vowel
The (near) open front rounded vowel, or (near) low front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that has not been confirmed to be phonemic in any spoken language. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ...
(or "low ...")
Front rounded vowels are cross-linguistically relatively uncommon, but occur in a number of well-known languages, including
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 ...
,
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 ...
,
Turkish and
Mandarin.
Lip rounding is produced by bringing the corners of the lips together and protruding them forward. This is harder to do while producing low or open vowels, since the lips are being stressed vertically. This may explain why low vowels are usually unrounded.
Roundedness is usually associated with back vowels. This helps to reinforce the low-pitched acoustic overtones associated with back vowels. This makes rounded back vowels more distinct from other vowels.
The high vowel is the most common, while the low vowel is extremely rare. This is consistent with the general correlation between rounding and vowel height.
Front rounded vowels usually occur in languages with
vowel systems that distinguish a higher than average number of different vowel qualities. Typically, when a front rounded vowel occurs, the inventory of vowels includes an unrounded front vowel and a rounded back vowel of similar height. For example, many languages with , such as
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 ...
,
Albanian, or
Dagur, also have and . Because of this, and what's known about many languages with front rounded vowels, front rounded vowels typically reflect a development from a vowel system that previously had fewer members.
Geographical distribution
Most languages with front rounded vowels are found in the more northern parts of
Eurasia
Eurasia (, ) is the largest continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. Primarily in the Northern and Eastern Hemispheres, it spans from the British Isles and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the Japanese archipelag ...
.
Language families in which front-rounded vowels are common are:
* Some
Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages ...
:
**
Chinese varieties (e.g.
Mandarin including
Standard Chinese
Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standa ...
;
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 ...
;
Wu Chinese
The Wu languages (; Wu romanization and IPA: ''wu6 gniu6'' [] ( Shanghainese), ''ng2 gniu6'' [] (Suzhounese), Mandarin pinyin and IPA: ''Wúyǔ'' []) is a major group of Sinitic languages spoken primarily in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Zhejiang Provin ...
)
**
Standard Tibetan
Lhasa Tibetan (), or Standard Tibetan, is the Tibetan dialect spoken by educated people of Lhasa, the capital of the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. It is an official language of the Tibet Autonomous Region.
In the traditional "three-branc ...
* Various
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...
:
** Modern
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, ...
(with the notable exceptions of the largest dialects of
Modern English (although
ːfor /uː/ is found in some accents in Northern England, and
�ːis a common
South African realization of /ɜː/),
Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...
, and many
German dialects
German dialects are the various traditional local varieties of the German language. Though varied by region, those of the southern half of Germany beneath the Benrath line are dominated by the geographical spread of the High German consonant s ...
)
**
Gallo-Romance languages
The Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages includes in the narrowest sense the Langues d'oïl and Franco-Provençal. However, other definitions are far broader, variously encompassing the Occitano-Romance, Gallo-Italic, and Rhaeto-Rom ...
(except Catalan), a subset of the
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 ...
(e.g.
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 ...
,
Occitan,
Lombard)
**
Albanian
**
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...
*
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 ...
(e.g.
Turkish,
Uyghur)
*
Mongolic languages
The Mongolic languages are a language family spoken by the Mongolic peoples in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Asia and East Asia, mostly in Mongolia and surrounding areas and in Kalmykia and Buryatia. The best-known member of this language ...
(e.g.
Kalmyk,
Dagur language
The Dagur, Daghur, Dahur, or Daur language, is a Mongolic language, as well as a distinct branch of the Mongolic language family, and is primarily spoken by members of the Dagur ethnic group.
Distribution
Dagur is a Mongolic language consisting ...
,
Inner Mongolian dialects; but not standard
Khalkha
The Khalkha ( Mongolian: mn, Халх, Halh, , zh, 喀爾喀) have been the largest subgroup of Mongol people in modern Mongolia since the 15th century. The Khalkha, together with Chahars, Ordos and Tumed, were directly ruled by Borjigin k ...
)
*
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 ...
(e.g.
Finnish,
Hungarian)
Development
Many of the Uralic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages which contain front rounded vowels also have
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, me ...
systems, such as rounding or backness harmony. The processes which bring about fronting or roundedness harmony may be important in introducing front rounded vowels into a language's inventory.
Front rounded vowels can also develop independently of vowel harmony. In French, is the result of an older moving forward while remaining rounded. French re-developed by moving upwards. For example, the familiar second-person pronoun , pronounced , is spelled the same as its
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 ...
source which had a back vowel, and the plural or polite second-person pronoun is pronounced with , but it derives from Latin which had a mid vowel. Some varieties of modern English are similarly fronting . In cases like these the creation of front rounded vowels is independent of adjacent sounds in the word.
In other languages front rounded vowels evolved as previously back vowels became fronted by adjacent segments. For example, in German, back vowels became fronted when followed by high front vowels. The front vowels causing this change were often in inflectional or derivational endings and were then lost or changed into mid vowels. In the different
Chinese languages
The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is ...
, is often derived from . The tongue must be moved forward to pronounce the , so the can shift forward as well. If the is lost then the change from to is complete.
Considering the different historical scenarios which can give rise to front rounded vowels, it is notable that they are relatively concentrated in a particular geographical region. It's likely that the presence of front rounded vowels in some languages can facilitate phonetically-motivated processes in other nearby languages.
References
{{IPA navigation
Front vowels
Rounded vowels