1

Introduction

2

Word
meanings

3

Word
forms: units

3.1

Phonemes

3.2

Iconicity

3.3

Vowels

3.4

English
consonants

3.5

Consonants
in other languages

3.6

Syllables

3.7

Problems

4

Word
forms: processes

5

Composition

6

Sentences

7

Grammatical
categories

8

Derivation

Appendices

A1

Phonetic
symbols

A2

Glossary

A3

Languages
cited

A4

References

3.3 Vowels

The goals of linguists, if you remember, are to describe what people
know about their language and to figure out how languages are similar and
different. For word forms, specifically for phonemes, this means that we
must describe both how speakers and hearers distinguish phonemes
within a given language and how individual phonemes and systems
of phonemes differ between languages. To satisfy both of these
goals, we will be looking for ways to describe the variation between
speech sounds. Just as we saw that categories of things could be described
in terms of values along different dimensions, we will be looking at
dimensions of sound, dimensions that allow us to make distinctions between
phonemes within and between languages.

Phonetic symbols

If we want to write down how words in different languages are
pronounced, why not just use the letters of English to do this? Could we
use the letters of English to write down the pronunciation of English
words? What if we want to distinguish the pronunciation of words in
different English dialects?

Before we discuss the specific phonemes of languages, we need to decide
how to represent the sounds. Let's briefly consider English. Like other
spoken languages, English has a set of vowel and consonant phonemes that
its speakers use to make the words of their language. Like other written
languages, English also has a way of graphically representing spoken word
forms. The English writing system is an example of an alphabetic
writing system in which phonemes are represented by characters or
combinations of characters. But, for various historical reasons, the
English writing system does this very imperfectly. Consider the words
way, weigh, wait, and wake. These words share
the same vowel phoneme, but it is spelled in four different ways. That is,
a single phoneme may be represented using different letters or
combinations of letters. Now consider the words bother,
brother, border, and voter. These words share the
letter o, but it represents four different vowels, each a different
phoneme. That is, a single letter may represent multiple phonemes. We can
conclude two things from this.

We must be careful not to confuse sounds with letters; the letter
o is not a vowel, though it is used to represent vowels.

We cannot rely on English spelling when we are concerned with the
pronunciation of English words.

Because we will need a way to represent the phonemes
of English and other languages unambiguously, we must rely on a set of
symbols for this that are not used quite like the alphabets of
any alphabetic writing systems. Symbols representing the basic sounds, or
phones, of spoken languages, are
called phonetic symbols. Linguists use a set of phonetic symbols called the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The symbols in the IPA are based on the characters
in the Roman alphabet, which is also the basis for the writing systems of
many languages, including English, Spanish, Lingala, and Tzeltal. The IPA
is overseen by the International Phonetics Association. Here
is a full chart of the IPA symbols that you can click on to hear some of
the sounds. Note that you probably won't understand this table until after
you've studied this section, the next one
on English consonants, and the one
after than on consonants in other languages. I will use a subset of
the IPA symbols in this book. (To view many of these symbols, you will
need Unicode support in your browser. Go to this
appendix to see if your browser has this support.)

Symbols for phonemes vs. symbols for phonetic details
and language differences

I will use phonetic symbols in two ways.
Much of the time they will be used to distinguish the phonemes within a
language. The important thing will be to make sure each phoneme has a
unique symbol; which symbol we use is not as important. When the symbols
are used in this way, they will be enclosed by slashes. As an example, my
pronunciation of the word phonemes is /'fonimz/. I will also be
using symbols in another way: to represent the actual sound that is
produced in a given situation, rather than a category of sounds (a
phoneme, that is), and to represent sound differences between different
dialects and different languages. For this purpose we will have to be more
careful about which symbols are used for which phones. When the symbols
are used in this way, they will be enclosed in square brackets. As an
example, my (more detailed) pronunciation of the word phonemes is
['foʊnɪimz]. It is important to note that the symbols are at best only an
approximation to the actual phone that is used in any given situation
because the space of possible phones is enormous, possibly infinite, while
we only have a relatively small, finite set of phonetic symbols.

Vowel features

Notice what you do with your mouth when you pronounce the names of the
letters "a", "e", "i", and "o". What features of your mouth seem to
distinguish these vowels from one another?

A complete account of the sounds of a spoken language (or of spoken
language in general) would have to make reference both to the way sounds
are produced, articulation, and the way they are perceived, their auditory properties. In this book we will not
have time to go into the auditory properties of speech in any detail, but
we cannot neglect them completely. Differences in articulation are
obviously pointless if they aren't reflected in the way the results sound
to hearers. In fact, two quite different ways of articulating a sound can
sometimes produce the same auditory effect. From the perspective of a
hearer, those would have to belong to the same phoneme.

In order to understand how vowels and consonants work, we need to know
a little bit about the physical apparatus that is used to produce them.
The figure below shows a side view of the vocal tract, with labels for
some of the parts that we'll be discussing in this section and the next
sections.

The heart of the system is the larynx, located in the throat under the Adam's apple; the
larynx contains the vocal cords, two pieces of flesh that can be loosened
or tightened. When air from the lungs passes through the larynx, it may be
allowed to pass unhindered, as when we are breathing out. Or the vocal
cords may be tightened and brought together so the air causes them to
vibrate. This vibration, or voicing, is what distinguishes normal speech from whispering
and certain speech sounds from others. Here
is a slow-motion movie, produced at the UCLA
Phonetics Laboratory, of the vocal cords vibrating during speech.

How the vocal tract is superior to a trumpet

Given an outward airstream and vibrating vocal cords, we have a device
that is a little like a brass musical instrument. The vocal cords are like
the vibrating lips of the musician, and the region of the vocal tract
between the larynx and the opening of the mouth (the yellow region in the
figure), the oral cavity, is like the body of the horn. What makes the vocal
tract far more versatile than a trumpet or a trombone, however, is that
speakers can change the shape of the instrument as they are playing it,
producing a great variety of sounds.

What distinguishes vowels from each other auditorily is the precise
shape and volume of the oral cavity, and the main organ involved in
adjusting the shape and volume is the tongue. Given the constraints
on the shape of the vocal tract and the way the tongue is manipulated,
there are three extreme positions the tongue can take that lead to vowel
sounds. If the body of the tongue is pushed forward and toward the roof of
the mouth, we get this vowel,
something like the vowel in the word beat and written with the
symbol [i]. If the body of the tongue is lowered while the back of the
tongue is pushed toward the roof of the mouth, we get this vowel,
something like the vowel in the word boot and written with the
symbol [u]. Note that in both cases the tongue cannot approach the roof of
the mouth too closely, or we get the sound of friction near the contact,
that is, a consonant rather than a vowel sound. Finally, if the body and
back of the tongue are both moved away from the roof of the mouth, at the
same time narrowing the region that is between the larynx and the mouth
(the "pharynx") we get this vowel,
something like the vowel in the word hot (as pronounced by most
Americans) and written in this book with the symbol [ɑ]. (The IPA symbol
for this sound is the variant of a in the Roman alphabet that
resembles this Greek letter.) The configurations of the vocal tract for
these three vowels are shown in the figures below.

How can we turn this informal description of what is going on in the
vocal tract into a more compact description that makes it clear how vowels
differ from one another? First, [i] and [u] share one property; they are
both associated with a relatively narrow gap between the tongue and the
roof of the mouth (and a relatively wide pharynx). They differ in this way
from [ɑ], which has the widest possible gap between the body of the tongue
and the roof of the mouth (and a relatively narrow pharynx). Just as we
spoke of dimensions
along which categories of meaning varied, we will speak here of dimensions
along which these sound categories vary. The dimension that distinguishes
[i] and [u] from [ɑ] we'll call height. So far we have seen two different values on this
dimension, one for [i] and [u] and another for [ɑ].

Another, equivalent way to talk about the difference
between these vowels is in terms of features; [i] and [u] have the feature high, while [ɑ] has the feature low. A feature always corresponds to some value on a
dimension. For example, with the domain of personal pronouns we saw that
the gender dimension had possible values of masculine, feminine, and
neuter; each of these can also be seen as feature. All of the things
having a certain feature can also be viewed as a category; thus there is
the category of masculine pronouns and the category of high vowels.

Turning a huge number of mouth configurations into a
small set of categories

Dimensions can be discrete, that
is, with a finite set of possible values, or continuous, that is, with an open-ended and
possibly infinite set of possible values. Gender is a discrete dimension —
there are only three possible values — while vowel height is a continuous
dimension because we can theoretically put the highest part of the tongue
at any point between the lowest and highest possible points. The fact that
height is a continuous dimension means that the values high and low identify
approximate points along the dimension and that a given vowel is
only relatively high or low. But note that the fact that a
dimension is continuous does not imply that people can distinguish all of
the possible values; they cannot. For example, speakers can probably
reliably produce and hearers can probably reliably distinguish no more
than about five different vowel heights. Note also that what is a
continuous dimension in the world may be treated as discrete within
language (or elsewhere in cognition). Thus within a given language, as
we'll see soon, only a small number of height distinctions are made.

The dimension of height distinguishes [i] and [u] from [ɑ], but it does
not distinguish [u] from [i]. Looking at the diagrams of the vocal tract
again, we can see that these two vowels differ mainly in terms of where
the narrowest gap between the tongue and the roof of the mouth is. For [i]
it is as far forward as it is possible for the tongue body to move and
still produce a vowel sound; for [u] it is as far backward as it is
possible for the tongue body to move and still produce a vowel sound. This
dimension is called backness; again we have seen (so far) two possible values on
this dimension: front, as for [i], and back, as for [u]. But note that, like height, backness
is a continuous dimension, so front and back are labels for approximate regions along the
dimension. For [ɑ], the closest point of approach between the tongue body
and the roof of the mouth is near the back of the mouth, so this is also
considered a back vowel. Summarizing, the two
articulatory dimensions of height and backness represent the location in
the mouth of the closest point of contact between the tongue body and the
roof of the mouth.

It turns out that these two articulatory dimensions correspond roughly
to two fundamental auditory dimensions. That is, as a speaker changes the
height of a vowel, the way that vowel sounds to a hearer changes along one
auditory dimension, and as a speaker changes the backness of a vowel, the
way that the vowel sounds to a hearer changes along another auditory
dimension. However, some recent research has shown that the correspondence
between the two articulatory and the two auditory dimensions is only
approximate. For vowels other than the extreme ones we've been discussing,
there are often multiple articulatory ways of achieving the same auditory
effect; precisely adjusting the position of the closest approach between
the tongue body and the roof of the mouth is only one of these ways. Thus
in a sense it is a bit of an over-simplification to characterize vowels in
terms of their precise height and backness. However, height and backness
still seem to provide the simplest articulatory description of vowels, and
I will follow this traditional approach in what follows.

If every vowel has a height value and a backness value, then we can
visualize all of the possible vowels in a two-dimensional space known as
vowel space. Given the constraints of the mouth and tongue, it
turns out that vowel space has roughly the shape of a trapezoid; this is
shown in the figure below, along with some of the terms used to refer to
different regions within vowel space. Recall that these terms are only for
convenience; there are really very many, maybe even an infinite number of,
possible positions within this space.

Vowels of Spanish

Spanish has five vowels, none quite like English.

We'll start with a relatively simple vowel system, that of Spanish.
Spanish has five vowel phonemes, represented in the Spanish alphabet by
the letters a, e, i, o, and u. The same
characters are conventionally used to represent the vowels themselves.
Listen to the vowels in these five Spanish words, and try to pronounce
them yourself (here and elsewhere in this book, we will focus on Western
Hemisphere, rather than European (Castilian), Spanish): piso,
puso, peso, poso, paso. You may not be
aware of the position of your tongue with respect to the roof of your
mouth, but you should be aware of how the position of your tongue changes
as you change from one vowel to another and how similar particular pairs
of vowels are to each other in terms of tongue position. The figure below
shows the approximate positions of the Spanish vowel phonemes in the vowel
trapezoid. The positions are approximate because each phoneme is a
category with a fairly wide range of possible pronunciations, depending in
particular on which consonants appear before or after the vowel. You can
click on each vowel in the figure to hear its pronunciation.

We can describe each of the Spanish vowels along the two dimensions of
height and backness. For Spanish we need three values of height and two
values of backness to do this. There is a further dimension that by itself
does not distinguish any of the vowels, but it will be useful for us in
discussing how languages and dialects differ from one another. This is the
degree of lip rounding that accompanies the vowel. In Spanish /u/ and /o/
are the only vowels accompanied by significant lip rounding. For /i/ and
/e/ the lips take the opposite position: they are spread. I will treat lip
rounding and spreading as a single dimension. The figure below shows
roughly where each of the Spanish vowels falls along the three dimensions
of height, backness, and rounding. Each vowel is represented by three
small circles of the same color, one for each dimension.

Another way to depict the differences is in a table that gives a label
(feature name) for the value of each vowel on each dimension. I will use
the symbol "∅" to indicate that a phone has no value or a default value
for a dimension.

/i/

/e/

/u/

/o/

/a/

Height

high

mid

high

mid

low

Backness

front

front

back

back

back

Rounding

sprd

sprd

rnd

rnd

∅

From the table, we can see that height is a
contrastive dimension
for Spanish vowels. That is, if we change nothing but the height of a
vowel phoneme, we get a different phoneme: lowering the height of /i/
gives us /e/; raising the height of /o/ gives us /u/. The situation is a
little more complicated for the other two dimensions because they tend to
change together. Changing only the backness of a Spanish vowel phoneme
does not give us a Spanish vowel at all. If we make /u/ a front vowel, we
also have to make it spread to get /i/. If we make /e/ a back vowel, we
also have to make it rounded to get /o/. If we make /a/ a front vowel, we
also have to make it mid to get /e/. The same holds if we attempt to
change only the rounding of a Spanish vowel. To distinguish all of the
Spanish vowels, we actually need only either backness or
rounding, but not both; that is, all we'd need to know about a Spanish
vowel would be its values on two dimensions to know which vowel it is
(verify this for yourself from the table). So we can call backness
contrastive or rounding contrastive, or we can call the combination of
backness and rounding contrastive. The point is that the system is
redundant; it provides more
information than is actually needed to make the distinctions.

Redundancy can come in handy in case the Hearer misses
something.

Redundancy is common in language. We will see further
examples with English vowels and in the grammar of various languages.
Redundancy is a Hearer-oriented
feature of language. When two or more different dimensions agree with one
another, the Hearer can still extract the meaning even if they fail to
note what is going on one of the dimensions. So with Spanish vowels, if
the Hearer detects that a vowel is high and back but misses the fact that
it is rounded, they can still know which vowel it is (/u/). The same would
be true if they only detected that the vowel was high and rounded, but not
that it was back.

Vowels of Japanese

The vowels of Standard Japanese are quite similar to
those of Spanish. There are five phonemes centered on roughly the same
positions in the vowel trapezoid as for Spanish. There are two
differences. First, the high back vowel, /u/ in Spanish, is not normally
rounded in Japanese; in Japanese it sounds like this. When we
need to make it clear that it's an unrounded high back
vowel we are discussing, we use the symbol [ɯ], but /u/ is
conventionally used to represent this Japanese vowel phoneme.

Unlike in English, in Japanese long vowels are just like
short vowels, only longer.

A second difference between Spanish and Japanese is more significant.
In Spanish, vowels tend not to vary too much in length, and how much they
vary depends on the dialect. In any case, if the length of a vowel is
changed in a word, we get the same word. So if a Spanish speaker
pronounces the word peso with an extra-long /e/, the difference
will probably be noticeable to a hearer, who might find it a bit odd but
would not interpret it as a different word. In other words, vowel
length is not contrastive in Spanish. Japanese
differs in this regard. If we take a Japanese word with a short vowel and
lengthen that vowel, we get potentially a different word. For example, su means
'nest', suu, with
the same vowel, roughly twice as long, means 'number'; koke
means 'moss', kokee
means 'solid', kookee
means 'succession'. (Note that ee and oo here represent long
versions of e and o, not the sounds these letters would
represent in English.) That is, vowel length is contrastive in Japanese.
Note that this does not mean that changing the length of any vowel in a
Japanese word must yield a different Japanese word, only that it
potentially does. Thus mise
'store' is a word, but miise is
not; miira
'mummy' is word, but mira is
not.

There are two ways to analyze Japanese long vowels. We could consider
each to be a separate phoneme, making ten vowel phonemes all together.
Alternatively we could consider each long vowel to be two short vowels in
succession. For our purposes, the choice doesn't really matter, and I will
go with the second alternative (which is the usual way to treat Japanese
vowels).

Vowels of General American English

Listen to the vowels in the words bit, bet, bat,
but beat, bait, boot, boat,
bought, bite, and bout. At least how many distinct
vowels does English have?

The first thing to note about the English vowels is that they are a
great deal more complicated than the Spanish or Japanese vowels. This
complexity has several consequences. First, there is considerable
disagreement among linguists on the details of how to describe English
vowels, and even some of the brief comments I have to make about them
below may be disputed by one or another linguist. Second, there are
considerable differences between dialects, and this makes an overall
description of English vowels difficult, if not impossible. Third, the
English vowel system (within a given dialect) is not as stable as a
simpler system like that of Spanish, and it is more likely to change over
time.

In this section, we will consider only the vowels of General American English (GA), specifically the
variety that I speak. (If you are not a speaker of GA, some of your vowels
may differ from those we'll be describing. Many of these differences are
described in the section on
English accents.) Let's begin with the front vowels. These are the
vowels in the following words, each followed by the symbol I will use to
represent the vowel: beat (/i/), bit (/ɪ/), bait
(/e/), bet (/ɛ/), bat (/æ/). The approximate positions of
these vowels in vowel space are shown in the figure below. Again you can
click on a symbol to hear the vowel.

You can see that five vowels are squeezed into the
front part of the vowel space, the same number of vowels that Spanish has
all together. If the differences in height (and minor differences in
backness) were the only dimensions distinguishing these vowels, this would
put quite a burden on the hearer, who after all has to figure out that
beat and bit are different words. It would also be a burden
on the speaker, who would have to be very careful in placing the tongue
for each vowel.

How English "long" and "short" vowels differ

So not surprisingly, these vowels are also distinguished from each
other along other dimensions. We can put the highest four vowels in two
groups, one consisting of the those traditionally called "long", /i/ and
/e/, the other consisting of those traditionally called "short", /ɪ/ and
/ɛ/. (The fifth vowel, /æ/, tends to group with the "short" vowels.) There
are at least three differences between these two groups. First, the "long"
vowels really do tend to be longer than the short vowels. Second, the
"short" vowels tend to be "pure"; that is, the position of the tongue does
not change during the production of the vowels. The "long" vowels, on the
other hand, involve some movement, in both cases toward the upper left
corner of vowel space. This is more noticeable for /e/ than it is for /i/
(but in other dialects, it is quite striking for /i/ too). Third, though
you probably can't feel this yourself, for the "long" vowels, the base
("root") of the tongue is pushed forward. Finally, the muscles in the
tongue are tenser than for the short vowels. Because values on the last
two dimensions tend to go together, they are often considered to be a
single dimension called tenseness. The two extremes on this dimension are referred to
as "tense" and "lax".

So we again have redundancy, as many as
five different dimensions distinguishing /i/ from /ɪ/ and /e/ from /ɛ/. It
appears that speakers do not always make use of all of these dimensions to
achieve the differences that hearers hear in them.

Now let's look at the central and back vowels
phonemes of GA. These are the vowels in the following words, with the
symbols for each after them: boot (/u/), put (/ʊ/),
boat (/o/), bought (/ɔ/), pot (/ɑ/), but
(/ʌ/). (Note: many GA speakers do not make a distinction between /ɔ/ and
/ɑ/; more on this in the section on
English accents.)

English vowels are so complicated that linguists don't
agree on how to treat some of them.

There is an additional central vowel, symbolized by /ə/, that appears
in two quite distinct environments. (The IPA symbol for this sound is an
upside-down e.) First, it is the most common vowel in unstressed
syllables in English, that is, syllables that are weakly articulated.
An example is the first phone in the word about and the last phone
in the word comma. Some people consider this to be the same phoneme
as /ʌ/; the main reason for treating it separately is that it behaves
differently from /ʌ/ in the history of the language as well as in a number
of modern dialects. Second, it appears followed by the
consonant /r/ (in stressed and unstressed syllables). This combination
is worth mentioning because speakers normally combine the two phones into
one vowel sound. Examples are the beginning of the word earth and
the end of the word actor. Again there is disagreement about how to
treat the phone; some people would prefer to treat /ər/ as a single
phoneme in the language.

The approximate positions of the back and central vowels in vowel space
are shown in the figure below. Again you can click on a symbol to hear the
vowel.

Again we find a large number of vowels squeezed into
a region of the height-backness space, and, not surprisingly, the vowels
differ on other dimensions. Like /i/ and /e/, /u/ and /o/ belong to the
set of "long" vowels. Both share the features of the other long vowels:
length, tendency to "move" as they are pronounced, and tenseness. /ʊ/,
/ɑ/, and /ʌ/ are clearly "short" vowels, sharing features with the front
"short" vowels /ɪ/, /ɛ/, and /æ/. /ə/ is "short" in its unstressed form,
but in the /ər/ combination, it resembles the "long" vowels. /ɔ/ can also
be relatively long, although it is usually lax, so it doesn't fit neatly
into the division between "long" and "short" vowels.

How two vowels can behave like one

There are three other "long" English vowels, all of them involving
significant movement during their production. Vowels of this sort, in
which the position of the tongue changes a lot during their production,
are called diphthongs. The symbols for diphthongs indicate both the
beginning and the end positions. Diphthongs are different from pairs of
vowels in that one of the two parts is pronounced more forcefully than the
other; for these English diphthongs the more forceful part is the first.
The English diphthongs are exemplified in the words bite,
bout, and boy; they are represented by the symbols /ay/,
/aw/, and /ɔy/. (Note that the symbol at the beginning of the first two
has not been used elsewhere for English, though it was used for Spanish
and Japanese. It represents a low vowel that is further front than /ɑ/;
we'll meet it again later when we discuss English accents.) The symbols
[y] and [w] are used for the second members of the diphthongs; these
correspond closely to the vowels [ɪ] and [ʊ]. We will meet these symbols
again in the
section on English consonants. The use of these consonant symbols
helps to show that the part of the diphthong that is "stronger" is the
first element. The figure below shows the paths that each of the
diphthongs traces in vowel space. You can click on the beginning symbol to
hear the vowel it represents.

You may be wondering why the diphthongs /ay/, /aw/, and /ɔy/ are
considered individual phonemes when each seems to consist of more than one
phone. Why can't we just treat them as sequences of two vowel phonemes?
The main reason is that the initial elements of these diphthongs behave
quite differently from any of the simple vowels. As we'll see later when
talk about differences
between English accents and phonological
change, the pronunciation of these diphthongs in a particular dialect
and at a particular point in the history of the language seems to have
nothing directly to do with the pronunciation of any of the simple vowels.
For example, changes in /æ/ and /ɑ/ over time may be unrelated to changes
in /ay/ and /aw/. Thus these diphthongs appear to be inseparable units for
English speakers and hearers.

General American has one more diphthong that is not usually
considered to be an individual phoneme. This is the part of the word
few following the initial "f" sound. Unlike the three diphthongs
discussed above, in this one it is the second element that is "stronger".
I will write this diphthong as /yu/. In modern English we can treat /yu/
as two separate phonemes because the second element tends to behave like
the vowel /u/ in most dialects; when /u/ changes its pronunciation over
time, /yu/ changes as well. The /y/ also appears to be a separate element
in that its pattern of occurrence depends on the consonant that precedes
it. Consider the following words: resume, lewd, news,
Tuesday, few, beautiful, music, cute.
In some accents, all of these words have /yu/; in others, /yu/ is used in
the last six; in others (for example, GA), /yu/ is used only in the last
four; in others, /yu/ never occurs.

Note that we have already discussed six dimensions for describing
vowels: height, backness, length, rounding, tenseness, and whether the
vowel height and backness change during the production of the vowel. I'll
call this last dimension diphthongization. For GA, all we need
to specify for this dimension is whether there is movement in the
direction of a high front position ([i]), in the direction of a high back
position ([u]), or not at all. (There are other possibilities in other
English dialects, as we will see later.)
Now we can describe all of the English vowels in terms of their values on
these dimensions. The table below does this (for all of the dimensions
except length). The point here is not to memorize any of this — there is,
after all, considerable disagreement about the details — the point is to
see how articulatory dimensions (features) allow us to begin to capture
what speakers and listeners seem to know about the vowel phonemes of a
language.

/i/

/ɪ/

/e/

/ɛ/

/æ/

HEIGHT

hi

hi

hi mid

lo mid

low

BACKNESS

frnt

frnt

frnt

frnt

frnt

ROUNDING

sprd

sprd

sprd

sprd

sprd

TENSENESS

tns

lax

tns

lax

lax

DIPHTHONGIZATION

→i

∅

→i

∅

∅

/u/

/ʊ/

/o/

/ɔ/

/ɑ/

/ʌ/

/ə/

HEIGHT

hi

hi

hi mid

lo mid

lo

hi mid

lo mid

BACKNESS

bk

bk

bk

bk

bk

cnt

cnt

ROUNDING

rnd

rnd

rnd

rnd

∅

∅

∅

TENSENESS

tns

lax

tns

lax

lax

lax

DIPHTHONGIZATION

→u

∅

→u

∅

∅

∅

∅

/ay/

/aw/

/ɔy/

HEIGHT

lo→hi

lo→hi

mid→hi

BACKNESS

cntr→frnt

cntr→back

back→frnt

ROUNDING

∅

∅→rnd

rnd→∅

TENSENESS

tns

tns

tns

DIPHTHONGIZATION

→i

→u

→i

Here are examples of each vowel, again as pronounced in my accent. You
may notice that the vowels do not sound exactly the same in different
words. Since each phoneme is a category, we should expect there
to be different variants in the same way that not all apples look alike.
I'll have more to say about this variation within phonemes in the section
on phonetic contexts.

/i/

bead, need,
happy

/ɪ/

bid, near,
insist

/e/

bait, bay

/ɛ/

bed, head,
berry

/æ/

bad, ban,
bat

/u/

booed, new,
tune

/ʊ/

book, put,
poor

/o/

boat, wrote,
old

/ɔ/

bought, saw,
lost, born

/ɑ/

body, father,
bar

/ʌ/

bud, none

/ə/

about, sofa,
further, listen,
convince

/ay/

ride, write,
buy

/aw/

bound, how

/ɔy/

boy, boil

Problems

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© 2009. Indiana University and Michael
Gasser.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation
License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.

URL:
www.indiana.edu/~hlw/PhonUnits/vowels.html
Edition 3.0; 2009-09-23