Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "uttering voice" or "speaking". Vowels usually form the peak or nucleus of a syllable, whereas consonants form the onset and coda. Some languages allow sounds that wouldn't normally be classified as vowels to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the sound of m in the English word prism, or the sound of r in the Czech word vrba (meaning "willow"). Sometimes vowels are defined by whether they form the nucleus of a syllable, and by that criterion these sounds are vowels, but usually sounds that can form the nucleus of a syllable are called sonorants.

Vowel qualities

Vowel space has many dimensions. The three most significant are height, backness, and roundedness.

The features that distinguish different vowels in a language, such as tongue position and lip roundedness, are said to determine the vowel's quality. See the table of vowels. A vowel sound whose quality doesn't change over the duration of the vowel is called a monophthong. Monophthongs are sometimes called "pure" or "stable" vowels. A vowel sound that glides from one quality to another is called a diphthong, and a vowel sound that glides between 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 [ɪ], the vowel sound in boy is in most dialects a diphthong [ɔɪ], and the vowels sounds of flower (BrE [aʊə] AmE [aʊɚ]) [form a triphthong, although the particular qualities vary by dialect. In phonology, diphthongs and triphthongs are distinguished from sequences of monophthongs by whether or not the vowel sound constitutes one or more syllables. For example, the vowel sounds in a two-syllable pronunciation of the word flower (BrE [flaʊə] AmE [flaʊɚ]) phonetically form a triphthong, but are phonologically a sequence of a diphthong (represented by the letters <ow>) and a monophthong (represented by the letters <er>).

Languages can distinguish different vowel qualities in a variety of ways:

• Height refers to the tongue position during the articulation of a vowel relative to the roof and bottom of the mouth. In high vowels, such as [i] and [u], the tongue is positioned high in the mouth, whereas in low vowels, such as [a], the tongue is positioned low in the mouth. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies seven different vowel heights, although no known language distinguishes all seven:
  • open vowel (low vowel)
  • near-open vowel
  • open-mid vowel
  • mid vowel
  • close-mid vowel
  • near-close vowel
  • close vowel (high vowel)

• Backness refers to the tongue position during the articulation of a vowel relative to the back and front of the mouth. In front vowels, such as [i], the tongue is positioned forward in the mouth, whereas in back vowels, such as [u], the tongue is positioned towards the back of the mouth. The International Phonetic Alphabet identifies five different degrees of vowel backness, although no known language distinguishes all five:
  • front vowel
  • near-front vowel
  • central vowel
  • near-back vowel
  • back vowel

• Roundedness is simply whether the lips are rounded, or not. Simply having a rounded vowel is not using this contrast because it must also have an unrounded version of the same vowel. French, German, and some dialects of English use roundedness as a contrast. Different kinds of rounded vowels are also possible, as in Swedish, which has "pursed lips" rounded vowels as well as "compressed lips" rounded vowels.

• Length refers to the duration of the vowel. Japanese, Arabic and Latin have a two-way contrast between short and long vowels. Estonian and Wichita have a three-way contrast among short, half-long, and long vowels. Long vowels are written in the IPA with a triangular colon, which has two equilateral triangles pointing at each other in place of dots. The IPA symbol for half-long vowels is the triangular colon without the lower triangle.

• Nasalization refers to whether some of the air escapes through the nose. In nasal vowels, the velum 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. French and Portuguese contrast nasal and oral vowels.

• Tenseness is the amount of energy expended in producing the vowel, so that tense vowels have higher formants and generally greater tongue involvement in the production of the sound that their lax counterparts. English contrasts vowels using this relatively rare feature: leap and suit are the tense versions of lip and soot, which are called lax.

• Voicing describes whether the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation of a vowel. Most languages only have voiced vowels, but several Native American languages, such as Cheyenne and Totonac, contrast voiced and devoiced vowels. Vowels are de-voiced in whispered speech, and in Japanese, vowels that are low pitched and between voiceless consonants are de-voiced.

• Creaky voice, breathy voice, and murmured voice are phonation types that are used contrastively in some languages. Often, these co-occur with tones or stress patterns; in the Mon language, vowels pronounced in "high tone" are also produced with creaky voice. In such contexts, 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.

• Retracted tongue root is also used in African languages. This contrast is used extensively in Maa and other East African languages. Advanced tongue root and retracted tongue root resembles the lax/tense contrast acoustically, but they have different articulation.

• Pharyngealisation occurs in some languages; Sedang uses this contrast.

Daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels.

Written vowels

The name "vowel" is often used for the symbols used for representing vowel sounds in a language's writing system, particularly if the language uses an alphabet. In the Latin alphabet, the vowel letters are usually A, E, I, O, U, and in some languages Y, as in English and W, as in Welsh.

There is necessarily not 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 the case of English, the five primary vowel letters can represent both long and short vowel sounds (some of the long vowel sounds in English are actually diphthongs). Furthermore, in English some vowel sounds are represented by combinations of vowel letters, such as the ea in beat or by a vowel letter and an approximant letter, as the ow in how, or the er in her.

Other languages cope with the limitation in the number of Latin vowel letters in similar ways. Many languages, like English, make extensive use of combinations of vowel letters to represent various sounds. Other languages add diacritical marks to vowels, such as accents or umlauts, 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 languages. The International Phonetic Alphabet has a set of 28 symbols to represent the range of basic vowel qualities, and a further set of diacritics to denote variations from the basic vowel.

Vowels in languages

The semantic significance of vowels varies widely depending on the language. In some languages, particularly Semitic languages, vowels mostly serve to denote inflections. This is similar to English man vs. men. In fact, the alphabets used to write the Semitic languages, such as the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet, do not ordinarily mark all the vowels. These alphabets are called abjads. Although it is possible to construct simple English sentences that can be understood without written vowels (cn y rd ths?), extended passages of English lacking written vowels are difficult if not impossible to completely understand (consider dd, which could be any of add, aided, dad, dada, dead, deed, did, died, dodo, dud, dude, eddie, iodide, or odd).

In most languages, vowels are unchangeable part of the words, as in English man vs. moon which are not different inflectional forms of the same word, but different words. Vowels are especially important to the structures of words in languages that have very few consonants (like Pacific languages such as Maori and Hawaiian) and in languages whose inventory of vowels is larger than its inventory of consonants (like Sedang, a relative of Vietnamese, which contrasts 55 different vowel qualities).

Vowel systems

Most languages have 3–7 vowels, the following 5-vowel system being the most common:

This particular configuration is common because it makes the most efficient use of the vowel space, so slight variations in a vowel are not easily confused for a different sound. Spanish and Modern Greek, for example, have this vowel system; Latin had a similar system that also distinguished between long and short vowels, although that distinction wasn't made in written Latin; it is for this reason that the Latin alphabet has five vowel letters. All languages have at least two vowels; the Tshwizhyi and Abzhui dialects of Abkhaz contrasts only /a/ and /i/, with significant allophony. (Some linguists claim that it is possible to posit only one vowel in some Abkhaz dialects, though the general consensus seems to be that that is stretching things a bit.) Three-vowel systems have been noted in a number of forms. These include:

• {i, a, u} (Arabic, Inuktitut),
• {i, a, o} (Pirahã),
• {i, e, a} (Wichita).

A few languages, such as Navajo, have four-vowel systems that lack either i or u, but there is no known natural language that lacks some form of a. At the other end of the spectrum, languages with more than twelve vowels are relatively uncommon, although some widely-spoken languages have large vowel inventories, particularly Germanic languages. For example, English has 14–16 vowels (including diphthongs) depending on dialect, and Swedish has the most distinct vowel qualities in the height-backness-roundedness spectrum, with 17 different monophthongs. French has 16 vowel qualities (including nasals), and the previously-mentioned Sedang holds the known record with 55 different vowels.

Written vowels in different writing systems

• Arabic: دَ دِ دُ دَ‌ا دَ‌ى دِ‌ي دُ‌و
• Korean: ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ ㅡ ㅢ ㅣ
• Russian: hard: А О У Ы Э ; soft: Я Ё Ю И Е
• Japanese: normal: あいうえお　grammatical: を

See also

• list of phonetics topics
• table of vowels
• list of vowels

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