A vowel is a 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 t ...

, forming the nucleus of a

syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

. 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, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

. Vowels vary in quality, in

loudness In acoustics, loudness is the subjectivity, subjective perception of sound pressure. More formally, it is defined as the "attribute of auditory sensation in terms of which sounds can be ordered on a scale extending from quiet to loud". The relat ...

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 refe ...

and are closely involved in

prosodic In linguistics, prosody () is the study of elements of speech, including intonation (linguistics), intonation, stress (linguistics), stress, Rhythm (linguistics), rhythm and loudness, that occur simultaneously with individual phonetic segments: v ...

variation such as

tone Tone may refer to: Visual arts and color-related * Tone (color theory), a mix of tint and shade, in painting and color theory * Tone (color), the lightness or brightness (as well as darkness) of a color * Toning (coin), color change in coins * ...

intonation Intonation may refer to: *Intonation (linguistics), variation of speaking pitch that is not used to distinguish words *Intonation (music), a musician's realization of pitch accuracy, or the pitch accuracy of a musical instrument *Intonation Music ...

and stress. 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 spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

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 (, , , , , and sometimes and ).

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 (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often prefer ...

. *In the

definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the English "ah" or "oh" , produced with an open

; 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 and

continuant In phonetics 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 ...

. There is no significant build-up of air pressure at any point above the

glottis The glottis (: glottises or glottides) is the opening between the vocal folds (the rima glottidis). The glottis is crucial in producing sound from the vocal folds. Etymology From Ancient Greek ''γλωττίς'' (glōttís), derived from ''γ ...

. This contrasts with

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 A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

, 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 ''y ...

. In

oral language A spoken language is a form of communication produced through articulate sounds or, in some cases, through manual gestures, as opposed to written language. Oral or vocal languages are those produced using the vocal tract, whereas sign languages are ...

s, phonetic vowels normally form the peak (nucleus) of many or all syllables, whereas

s form the onset and (in languages that have them) coda. Some languages allow other sounds to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the

(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 known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually i ...

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 prod ...

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 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 articulated in various w ...

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 standard written 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 p ...

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 sligh ...

position (nasality), type of

vocal fold In humans, the vocal cords, also known as vocal folds, are folds of throat tissues that are key in creating sounds through Speech, vocalization. The length of the vocal cords affects the pitch of voice, similar to a violin string. Open when brea ...

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 The jaws are a pair of opposable articulated structures at the entrance of the mouth, typically used for grasping and manipulating food. The term ''jaws'' is also broadly applied to the whole of the structures constituting the vault of the mouth ...

. 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 harmo ...

(lowest resonance of the voice), abbreviated F1, which is associated with the height of the tongue. There are two terms commonly applied to refer to two degrees of vowel height: 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 Esling'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

has letters for six degrees of vowel height for full vowels (plus the reduced mid vowel ), but it is extremely unusual for a language to distinguish this many degrees without other attributes. The IPA letters distinguish (sorted according to height, with the top-most one being the highest and the bottom-most being the lowest): *

close Close may refer to: Music * ''Close'' (Kim Wilde album), 1988 * ''Close'' (Marvin Sapp album), 2017 * ''Close'' (Sean Bonniwell album), 1969 * "Close" (Sub Focus song), 2014 * "Close" (Nick Jonas song), 2016 * "Close" (Rae Sremmurd song), 201 ...

( high): i y ɨ ʉ ɯ u * near-close ( near-high): ɪ ʏ ʊ * close-mid ( high-mid): e ø ɘ ɵ ɤ o * mid: (the reduced vowel ) *

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 approximat ...

( low-mid): ɛ œ ɜ ɞ ʌ ɔ * near-open ( near-low): æ (plus the reduced vowel ) *

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), 1969 * ''Open'' (Gerd Dudek, Buschi Niebergall, and Edward Vesala album), 1979 * ''Open'' (Go ...

( low): a ɶ ɑ ɒ The letters are defined as close-mid but are commonly used for true

mid vowel A mid vowel (or a true-mid vowel) is any in a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned approximately midway between an open vowel and a close vowel. Other n ...

s. If more precision is required, true mid vowels may be written with a lowering or raising diacritic: or . The

Kensiu language Kensiu (Kensiw) is an Austroasiatic language of the Jahaic (Northern Aslian) subbranch. It is spoken by a small community of 300 people in Yala Province in southern Thailand and also reportedly by a community of approximately 300 speakers in ...

, spoken in Malaysia and Thailand, is highly unusual in contrasting true mid vowels with both close-mid and open-mid vowels, without any additional parameters such as length, roundness or ATR. The front vowels, , along with open , make a six-way height distinction; this holds even for the nasal vowels. A few varieties of

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

have been reported to have five contrastive vowel heights that are independent of length or other parameters. For example, the Bavarian dialect of Amstetten has thirteen long vowels, which have been analyzed as four vowel heights (close, close-mid, mid, open-mid) each among the front unrounded, front rounded, and back rounded vowels, along with an open vowel for a fifth height: . Apart from the aforementioned

, 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 form of communication produced through articulate sounds or, in some cases, through manual gestures, as opposed to written language. Oral or vocal languages are those produced using the vocal tract, whereas sign languages ar ...

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, ''v ...

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

defines five degrees of vowel backness (sorted according to backness, with the top-most one being the front-most back and the bottom-most being the back-most): *

front Front may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''The Front'' (1943 film), a 1943 Soviet drama film * '' The Front'', 1976 film Music * The Front (band), an American rock band signed to Columbia Records and active in the 1980s and ...

* near-front * central * near-back *

back The human back, also called the dorsum (: dorsa), is the large posterior area of the human body, rising from the top of the buttocks to the back of the neck. It is the surface of the body opposite from the chest and the abdomen. The vertebral c ...

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 pro ...

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 the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers ab ...

(

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 more than 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 West Asia. The Turkic langua ...

(with a rounding distinction for front vowels and ), and

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overseas Vietnamese, Vietnamese people living outside Vietna ...

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 invol ...

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 and Norwegian 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), ''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 vowel A raised vowel is a vowel sound in which the body of the tongue is raised upward and backward toward the dorsum (soft palate). The most raised cardinal vowels are ; also quite raised are , and . Raised vowels and retracted vowels constitute the ...

s, where the body of the tongue approaches the velum (], etc.), and

retracted vowel A retracted vowel is a vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels ...

s, where the root of the tongue approaches the pharynx (, etc.): *

raised ''Raised'' is the third studio album by American country artist Hailey Whitters. It was released on March 18, 2022, via a partnership between Big Loud and her own imprint, Pigasus. Background Heavily inspired by her Midwestern upbringing in Iow ...

* retracted Membership in these categories is scalar, with the mid-central vowels being marginal to any category.

Nasalization

Nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) 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 . ...

occurs when air escapes through the nose. Vowels are often nasalised under the influence of neighbouring nasal consonants, as in English ''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 may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France ** French people, a nation and ethnic group ** French cuisine, cooking traditions and practices Arts and media * The French (band), ...

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 /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are p ...

s, the

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 Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Polish people, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken * Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin ...

and Portuguese also contrast nasal and oral vowels.

Phonation

Voicing describes whether the

vocal cords In humans, the vocal cords, also known as vocal folds, are folds of throat tissues that are key in creating sounds through Speech, vocalization. The length of the vocal cords affects the pitch of voice, similar to a violin string. Open when brea ...

are vibrating during the articulation of a vowel. Most languages have only voiced vowels, but several

Native American languages The Indigenous languages of the Americas are the languages that were used by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas Pre-Columbian era, before the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples. Over a thousand of these languages are still used today, while m ...

, such as

Cheyenne The Cheyenne ( ) are an Indigenous people of the Great Plains. The Cheyenne comprise two Native American tribes, the Só'taeo'o or Só'taétaneo'o (more commonly spelled as Suhtai or Sutaio) and the (also spelled Tsitsistas, The term for th ...

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 cit ...

, have both voiced and devoiced vowels in complementary distribution. Vowels are devoiced in whispered speech. In Japanese and in

Quebec French Quebec French ( ), also known as Québécois French, is the predominant variety (linguistics), variety of the French language spoken in Canada. It is the dominant language of the province of Quebec, used in everyday communication, in education, ...

, vowels that are between voiceless consonants are often devoiced.

Keres In Greek mythology, the Keres (; Ancient Greek: Κῆρες) were female death-spirits. They were the goddesses who personified violent death and who were drawn to bloody deaths on battlefields. Although they were present during death and dyin ...

is disputed to have phonemic voiceless vowels but no language is confirmed to have them phonemically.

Modal voice Modal voice is the vocal register used most frequently in speech and singing in most languages. It is also the term used in linguistics for the most common phonation of vowels. The term "modal" refers to the resonant mode of vocal folds; that ...

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 s ...

(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 defi ...

types that are used contrastively in some languages. Often, they co-occur with

or stress distinctions; in the

Mon language The Mon language, formerly known as Peguan and Talaing, is an Austroasiatic language spoken by the Mon people. Mon, like the related Khmer language, but unlike most languages in mainland Southeast Asia, is not tonal. The Mon language is a recogn ...

, 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 Phonemic contrast refers to a minimal phonetic difference, that is, small differences in speech sounds, that makes a difference in how the sound is perceived by listeners, and can therefore lead to different mental lexical entries for words. ...

. The combination of phonetic cues (phonation, tone, stress) is known as ''register'' or ''register complex''.

Tenseness

Tenseness In phonology, tenseness or tensing is, most generally, 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 ...

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, ...

s, e.g.

), 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 countries in the Americas **Spanish cuisine **Spanish history **Spanish culture ...

) 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 , as in ''mate''. Lax vowels occur in words without the silent , such as ''mat''. In

American English American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lang ...

, 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 languages, 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 spoke ...

, lax vowels can only occur in

closed syllables A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

. 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 (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. Though no official boundary exists, the most common ...

, and scattered other languages such as Modern

Mongolian Mongolian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Mongolia, a country in Asia * Mongolian people, or Mongols * Bogd Khanate of Mongolia, the government of Mongolia, 1911–1919 and 1921–1924 * Mongolian language * Mongolian alphabet * ...

. 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 ...

. 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, or sometimes Caspian languages (from the Caspian Sea, in contrast to ''Pontic languages'' for the Northwest Caucasian languages), is a langu ...

and the

Khoisan languages The Khoisan languages ( ; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a number of Languages of Africa, African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click languages, click consonant ...

. 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 vibr ...

s of the Khoisan languages, where the

larynx The larynx (), commonly called the voice box, is an organ (anatomy), 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 ...

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. 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

s, acoustic

resonance Resonance is a phenomenon that occurs when an object or system is subjected to an external force or vibration whose frequency matches a resonant frequency (or resonance frequency) of the system, defined as a frequency that generates a maximu ...

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 resona ...

, 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 approximately 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 ...

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 approximately as close as possible to ...

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 approximately as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction th ...

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 Course ...

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 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 articulated in various w ...

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'' (abbreviated as 0 or 1 ), is defined as the lowest frequency of a Periodic signal, periodic waveform. In music, the fundamental is the musical pitch (music), pitch of a n ...

(

intensity Intensity may refer to: In colloquial use * Strength (disambiguation) *Amplitude * Level (disambiguation) * Magnitude (disambiguation) In physical sciences Physics *Intensity (physics), power per unit area (W/m2) *Field strength of electric, m ...

) and

length Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with Dimension (physical quantity), dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a Base unit (measurement), base unit for length is chosen, ...

( duration). However, the features of prosody are usually considered to apply not to the vowel itself, but to the

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

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 a ...

and all will participate in any pitch variation. * Loudness: this variable has been traditionally associated with linguistic stress, 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 or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...

. One is the

difference in length exhibited by some languages.

, Finnish, Hungarian,

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

and

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, or one whose articulation at beginning and end is relatively fixed, with the tongue moving neither up nor down and neither forward nor backward towards a new position of articulation. A monophthong can be ...

. 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 or a vowel glide, 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 ...

, and a vowel sound that glides successively through three qualities is a

triphthong In phonetics, a triphthong ( , ) (from Greek , ) is a monosyllabic vowel combination involving a quick but smooth movement of the articulator from one vowel quality to another that passes over a third. While "pure" vowels, or monophthongs, are ...

. 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 (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

, diphthongs and triphthongs are distinguished from sequences of monophthongs by whether the vowel sound may be analyzed into distinct

phonemes A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...

. 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 comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

, particularly if the language uses an

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

. In writing systems based on the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

, the letters , , , , , , 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 and , 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 prod ...

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 in "thigh" and in "x-ray". In addition, extensions of the Latin alphabet have such independent vowel letters as , , , , and . The phonetic values vary considerably by language, and some languages use and for the consonant , e.g., initial in

Italian Italian(s) may refer to: * Anything of, from, or related to the people of Italy over the centuries ** Italians, a Romance ethnic group related to or simply a citizen of the Italian Republic or Italian Kingdom ** Italian language, a Romance languag ...

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, traditional ...

and initial in English. In the original Latin alphabet, there was no written distinction between and , and the letter represented the approximant and the vowels and . In Modern Welsh, represents these same sounds. 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 and can represent a variety of vowel sounds, while the letter frequently represents vowels (as in e.g., "gym", "happy", or the diphthongs in "cry", "thyme"); is used in representing some

s (as in "cow") and to represent a

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 in Swedish, 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 ogoneks, 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 or 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 also r ...

s. The

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 (, ), known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is a unicase, unicameral abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably ...

and the

Arabic alphabet The Arabic alphabet, or the Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is a unicase, unicameral script written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most ...

, do not ordinarily mark all the vowels, since they are frequently unnecessary in identifying a word. Technically, these are called

abjad An abjad ( or abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving the vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels. The term was introd ...

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''. (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 (, 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 in the Jewish centers of the Levant (e.g., Tiberias and Jerusalem) an ...

devised a vowel notation system for Hebrew

Jewish scripture The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh (;"Tanach"
. ''

trope Trope or tropes may refer to: Arts and entertainment * 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 in medi ...

symbols used for its cantillation; both are part of

oral tradition Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.Jan Vansina, Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (19 ...

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 English phonology, pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), begi ...

. 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 occurred, 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 or Quranic Arabic () is the standardized literary form of Arabic used from the 7th century and throughout the Middle Ages, most notably in Umayyad Caliphate, Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphate, Abbasid literary texts such as poetry, e ...

, some

Malayic languages The Malayic languages are a branch of the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of the Austronesian language family. The two most prominent members of this branch are Indonesian and Malay. Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia and has evolved ...

of Borneo (including Banjarese) and

Inuktitut Inuktitut ( ; , Inuktitut syllabics, syllabics ), also known as Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, is one of the principal Inuit languages of Canada. It is spoken in all areas north of the North American tree line, including parts of the provinces of ...

, though Adyghe and many

Sepik languages The Sepik or Sepik River languages are a language family, family of some 50 Papuan languages spoken in the Sepik River, Sepik river basin of northern Papua New Guinea, proposed by Donald Laycock in 1965 in a somewhat more limited form than prese ...

have a

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 first syllable ('' prothesis''), the last syllable ('' paragoge''), or between two syllabic sounds in a word. The opposite process in whi ...

. 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

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

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:

and

are two closely related

Romance languages The Romance languages, also known as the Latin or Neo-Latin languages, are the languages that are Language family, directly descended from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-E ...

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 spoken throughout Mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. These languages are natively spoken by the majority of the population in Vietnam and Cambodia, and by minority pop ...

of Southeast Asia also have some large inventories, such as the ten vowels of Khmer: . Wu dialects have the largest inventories of Chinese; the

Jinhui dialect The Jinhui dialect ( zh, s=金汇方言, p=Jīnhuì fāngyán), also known as Dônđäc ( zh, c=偒傣, p=Dàngdǎi), is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the town of , China in Shanghai's suburban Fengxian District. It has about 100,000 native s ...

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 Tagal ...

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 Nahuas, most of whom live mainly in Central Mexico and have smaller popul ...

and

Navajo The Navajo or Diné are an Indigenous people of the Southwestern United States. Their traditional language is Diné bizaad, a Southern Athabascan language. The states with the largest Diné populations are Arizona (140,263) and New Mexico (1 ...

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 ta ...

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, worm,

myrrh Myrrh (; from an unidentified ancient Semitic language, see '' § Etymology'') is a gum-resin extracted from a few small, thorny tree species of the '' Commiphora'' genus, belonging to the Burseraceae family. Myrrh resin has been used ...

'' that some phoneticians analyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic consonant . However, others analyze these words instead as having a

rhotic vowel 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 articulated in various w ...

, . 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 or other material intended to block or obscure light, air drafts, or (in the case of a shower curtain) water. Curtains are often hung on the inside of a building's windows to block the passage of light. For instan ...

,'' and ''

turtle Turtles are reptiles of the order (biology), order Testudines, characterized by a special turtle shell, shell developed mainly from their ribs. Modern turtles are divided into two major groups, the Pleurodira (side necked turtles) and Crypt ...

:'' , 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 (or rarely echoism) is a type of word, or the process of creating a word, that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Common onomatopoeias in English include animal noises such as ''oink'', '' ...

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

, for example, the consonants and (the difference is not written) can act as a

syllable nucleus A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...

and carry rising or falling

; 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 *Czech (surnam ...

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 , which means "A morel full of spots wetted from fogs". (Here has two syllables based on L; and the

preposition Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...

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 , , and . 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

, 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 There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages, Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not Mutual intelligibility, mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the m ...

, such as

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

and Minnan, some monosyllabic words are made of exclusively

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, have been

s, such as , , , and , which have a

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, are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by Berbers, Berber communities, ...

, some languages of the American

, such as

Nuxalk The Nuxalk people (Nuxalk language, Nuxalk: ''Nuxalkmc''; pronounced )'','' also referred to as the Bella Coola, Bellacoola or Bilchula, are an Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Indigenous First Nations in Canada, First Nation ...

, and some

Northwest Caucasian languages The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called West Caucasian, Abkhazo-Adyghean, Abkhazo-Circassian, Circassic, or sometimes Pontic languages (from Ancient Greek, ''pontos'', referring to the Black Sea, in contrast to the Northeast Caucasian ...

, such as

Abaza language Abaza is the name of an ethnic group closely related to the Circassians, the Abazins, their language, the Abaza language, an Egyptian noble family of the same origin, the Abaza family, Abaza Family, and a surname. The Abazin people's "self-design ...

. An example from Nuxalk 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". Abaza language often drops word-final /ə/ when forming compounds, making combinations such as хъкӏхвбкъвылкӏ /qʰkʼχʷbqʷʼəlkʼ/ "five vats of sour cream" possible. Therefore, even though the dictionary forms хъкӏы /qʰkʼə/ "sour cream" and хвпа /χʷpʰa/ "five" have a schwa at the end, the consonant cluster /qʰkʼ/ and the sole consonant /χʷ/ (-pa is a counting suffix) can be analysed as the full word, with final vowels probably being a result of obligatory

nucleus Nucleus (: nuclei) is a Latin word for the seed inside a fruit. It most often refers to: *Atomic nucleus, the very dense central region of an atom *Cell nucleus, a central organelle of a eukaryotic cell, containing most of the cell's DNA Nucleu ...

(such as in the first example, where the word бкъвыл /bqʷʼəl/ "vat" is a closed syllable, preventing the vowel deletion, unless /l/ is analysed as a

syllabic consonant A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''awful'', respectively. To represe ...

, which would still make it a nucleus but would make the word vowelless). In

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin ( ; zh, s=, t=, p=Guānhuà, l=Mandarin (bureaucrat), officials' speech) is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretch ...

, 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 () 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 significant progress ...

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'' (in some accents: ). However, vowel sequences in hiatus (linguistics), hiatus are more freely allowed in some other languages, most famously perhaps in Bantu languages, Bantu and Polynesian languages, Polynesian languages, but also in

and Finnic languages. In such languages there tends to be a larger variety of vowel-only words. In Swahili language, Swahili (Bantu), for example, there is ''wikt:aua, aua'' 'to survey' and ''wikt:eua, eua'' 'to purify' (both three syllables); in Japanese, ''wikt:aoi, aoi'' 青い 'blue/green' and ''wikt:oioi, oioi'' 追々 'gradually' (three and four On (Japanese prosody), morae); and in Finnish, 'intention' and 'open!' (both two syllables), although some dialects pronounce them as and . In Urdu, āye/aaie or āyn 'come' is used. Hawaiian language, 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, which is quite Productivity (linguistics), productive in Polynesian: 'grooves', 'breath', 'tough' (all four syllables), 'crying' (five syllables, from 'to weep'), or 'false mullet' (sp. fish, three or five syllables).

Notes

References

Bibliography

* ''Handbook of the International Phonetic Association'', 1999. Cambridge University * Johnson, Keith, ''Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics'', second edition, 2003. Blackwell * Korhonen, Mikko. ''Koltansaamen opas'', 1973. Castreanum * Peter Ladefoged, Ladefoged, Peter, ''A Course in Phonetics'', fifth edition, 2006. Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth * Ladefoged, Peter, ''Elements of Acoustic Phonetics'', 1995. University of Chicago * * 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.

External links

with MP3 sound files
IPA vowel chart
with Audio Interchange File Format, AIFF sound files
Materials for measuring and plotting vowel formants
Online examples from Ladefoged's ''Vowels and Consonants'', referenced above. {{Authority control Vowels, Manner of articulation Phonetics