Vowel

• 1. Defining The Vowel

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  A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any obstruction in the vocal tract. This definition distinguishes it from consonants, which require some form of constriction or closure along the airway. The word itself comes from the Latin term for vocal, relating directly to the voice. In English, the term covers both the sounds and the written symbols that represent them. These symbols include letters like A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.

  Two distinct definitions exist within linguistics. One focuses on phonetics, describing the physical production of sound with an open vocal tract. The other focuses on phonology, defining vowels as syllabic elements that form the peak of a syllable. A sound can be phonetically vowel-like but function phonologically as a consonant if it appears at the start of a syllable. Linguist Kenneth Pike suggested terms like vocoid for these phonetic vowels to resolve such conflicts.

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• 2. Articulatory Mechanics

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  Daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels using tongue height, backness, and lip rounding. Early phoneticians believed they were mapping the highest point of the tongue. Peter Ladefoged later noted this was inaccurate because they were actually measuring formant frequencies. The International Phonetic Alphabet treats the traditional quadrilateral as an abstraction rather than a direct map of tongue position.

  Vowel height refers to the vertical position relative to the roof of the mouth or jaw aperture. Close vowels have high first formant values while open vowels have low ones. Backness describes the horizontal position of the tongue during articulation. Front vowels exhibit higher second formant frequencies compared to back vowels. Lip rounding creates acoustic changes by decreasing the second formant frequency. Swedish and Norwegian remain the only known languages where exolabial and endolabial rounding are contrastive features.

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• 3. Acoustic Analysis

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  Spectrograms visualize the physical properties of speech sounds through dark bands representing acoustic resonances. These bands are called formants and appear on the spectrogram based on vocal tract resonance. The first formant corresponds to vowel openness while the second formant indicates frontness. Open vowels display high F1 frequencies whereas close vowels show low F1 frequencies. Front vowels possess substantially higher F2 frequencies than back vowels.

  Peter Ladefoged changed his textbook recommendations regarding how to plot these values over three editions. He initially suggested plotting F1 against F2 minus F1 but later adopted simple plots of F1 against F2. This method allows analysts to compare vowel quality across diverse languages including Queen's English, American English, and various indigenous Australian dialects. R-colored vowels specifically feature lowered third formant values that distinguish them from standard vowels.

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• 4. Global Inventory Systems

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  Nearly all spoken languages contain at least three phonemic vowels like those found in Classical Arabic or Inuktitut. Some languages utilize vertical systems with only two vowels such as Arrernte or Circassian. Germanic languages often boast some of the largest inventories available. Standard Danish contains between eleven and thirteen short vowels while the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian has been reported to hold thirteen long vowels.

  The Mon-Khmer languages of Southeast Asia also maintain large inventories. Khmer features ten distinct vowels while Wu dialects of Chinese can reach eleven vowels. Spanish contrasts sharply with French despite their shared Romance heritage since Spanish possesses only five pure vowel qualities compared to classical French's eleven. The most common vowel globally is the open central unrounded sound yet Tehuelche language uses just two vowels without any close variants.

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• 5. Orthographic Representation

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  Writing systems based on the Latin alphabet use letters A through U to represent vowel sounds but these do not always correspond one-to-one with actual speech. The letter Y frequently represents vowels in words like gym, happy, cry, and thyme. In English spelling, combinations of letters often stand for single sounds while a single letter might represent multiple sounds depending on context. Hebrew and Arabic alphabets are called abjads because they do not ordinarily mark all vowels within words.

  The Masoretes devised a vowel notation system for Hebrew Jewish scripture that remains widely used today. This system includes trope symbols for cantillation which form part of oral tradition. Words lacking written vowels in English can become indistinguishable from one another. Consider the string dd which could represent dad, dada, dado, dead, deed, did, died, diode, dodo, dud, dude, odd, add, or aided. Abjads generally express some internal vowels plus all initial and final vowels to reduce ambiguity.

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• 6. Historical Sound Shifts

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  The Great Vowel Shift explains differences in pronunciation between English and its related languages after printing was introduced to England. Spelling became standardized before dramatic changes occurred in the pronunciation of vowel phonemes during recent centuries. These shifts were not reflected in the existing spelling system leading to numerous inconsistencies. Speakers of English now mispronounce foreign words and names due to these historical divergences.

  Other sound shifts affect specific regions and dialects over time. Bradford English shows evidence of vowel fronting as analyzed by researchers. The Mixe language maintains a three-way contrast among short, half-long, and long vowels. Japanese, Finnish, Hungarian, Arabic, and Latin exhibit two-way contrasts between short and long vowels. These diachronic changes demonstrate how vowel systems evolve differently across cultures and eras without following a single universal path.

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