Linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

s use a variety of symbols to represent not just single sounds, but certain particular classes of sounds. They are usually capital letters. This article lists those "cover symbols".

Consonants

Vowels

Capitalized vowels are commonly used in discussions of languages with

vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is a phonological rule in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – must share certain distinctive features (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning tha ...

. They often indicate different harmonic variants of an underlying archiphonemic vowel. Some vowel symbols in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

, such as are also sometimes used as cover symbols.

Other symbols

{{Phonetics-stub Phonetics