Vowel

A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract.^[1] 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 (length). They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress.

The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice).^[2] In English, the word vowel is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them (⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩, and sometimes ⟨w⟩ and ⟨y⟩).^[3]

In the definition, a vowel is a sound, such as the English "ah" /ɑː/ or "oh" /oʊ/, produced with an open vocal tract; 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.^[4] There is no significant build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as the English "sh" [ʃ], which have a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract.

phonetic

In the phonological definition, a vowel is defined as , the sound that forms the peak of a syllable.^[5] A phonetically equivalent but non-syllabic sound is a semivowel. In oral languages, phonetic vowels normally form the peak (nucleus) of many or all syllables, whereas consonants 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 syllabic (i.e., vocalic) l in the English word table [ˈtʰeɪ.bl̩] (when not considered to have a weak vowel sound: [ˈtʰeɪ.bəl]) or the syllabic r in the Serbo-Croatian word vrt [ʋr̩̂t] "garden".

syllabic

There are two complementary definitions of vowel, one phonetic and the other phonological.

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).^[6] The approximants [j] and [w] 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 /ɝ/ or a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/. The American linguist Kenneth Pike (1943) suggested the terms "vocoid" for a phonetic vowel and "vowel" for a phonological vowel,^[7] so using this terminology, [j] and [w] 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.^[8] Nonetheless, the phonetic and phonemic definitions would still conflict for the syllabic /l/ in table or the syllabic nasals in button and rhythm.

(a.k.a. high): i y ɨ ʉ ɯ u

close

(a.k.a. near-high): ɪ ʏ ʊ

near-close

(a.k.a. high-mid): e ø ɘ ɵ ɤ o

close-mid

: (the reduced vowel [ə])

mid

(a.k.a. low-mid): ɛ œ ɜ ɞ ʌ ɔ

open-mid

(a.k.a. near-low): æ (plus the reduced vowel [ɐ])

near-open

(a.k.a. low): a ɶ ɑ ɒ

open

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 and all will participate in any pitch variation.

voiced

Loudness: this variable has been traditionally associated with linguistic , 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.

stress

Length: it is important to distinguish two aspects of . One is the phonological difference in length exhibited by some languages. Japanese, Finnish, Hungarian, Arabic and Latin have a two-way phonemic contrast between short and long vowels. The Mixe language has a three-way contrast among short, half-long, and long vowels.^[31] 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.

vowel length

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), loudness (intensity) and length (duration). However, the features of prosody are usually considered to apply not to the vowel itself, but to the syllable in which the vowel occurs. In other words, the domain of prosody is the syllable, not the segment (vowel or consonant).^[30] We can list briefly the effect of prosody on the vowel component of a syllable.

English phonology

Great Vowel Shift

Inherent vowel

List of phonetics topics

Mater lectionis

Scale of vowels

Table of vowels

Vowel coalescence

Words without vowels

Zero consonant

Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, 1999. ISBN 978-0-521-63751-0

Cambridge University

Johnson, Keith, Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics, second edition, 2003. Blackwell 978-1-4051-0123-3

ISBN

Korhonen, Mikko. Koltansaamen opas, 1973. Castreanum 978-951-45-0189-0

ISBN

A Course in Phonetics, fifth edition, 2006. Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth ISBN 978-1-4130-2079-3

Ladefoged, Peter

Ladefoged, Peter, Elements of Acoustic Phonetics, 1995. ISBN 978-0-226-46764-1

University of Chicago

; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.

Ladefoged, Peter

Ladefoged, Peter, Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages, 2000. Blackwell 978-0-631-21412-0.

ISBN

Lindau, Mona. (1978). "Vowel features". Language. 54 (3): 541–563. :10.2307/412786. JSTOR 412786.

doi

Stevens, Kenneth N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics. Current studies in linguistics (No. 30). Cambridge, MA: MIT. 978-0-262-19404-4.

ISBN

Stevens, Kenneth N. (2000). "Toward a model for lexical access based on acoustic landmarks and distinctive features". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 111 (4): 1872–1891. :2002ASAJ..111.1872S. doi:10.1121/1.1458026. PMID 12002871. S2CID 1811670.

Bibcode

Watt, D. and Tillotson, J. (2001). A spectrographic analysis of vowel fronting in Bradford English. English World-Wide 22:2, 269–302. Available at

https://web.archive.org/web/20120412023624/http://www.abdn.ac.uk/langling/resources/Watt-Tillotson2001.pdf

with MP3 sound files

IPA chart

with AIFF sound files

IPA vowel chart

Materials for measuring and plotting vowel formants

Archived 2005-07-03 at the Wayback Machine Online examples from Ladefoged's Vowels and Consonants, referenced above.