vowel

Also known as vowel sound, vocal sound

A vowel () is a speech sound pronounced without any in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, loudness, and length. They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress. The nucleus, or "center", of a syllable typically consists of a vowel sound (though this is not always the case).

AI overview

A vowel is a speech sound made without any obstruction in the vocal tract, and it forms one of the two main categories of speech sounds along with consonants. Vowels are important because they typically form the core of syllables and help create the rhythm, pitch, and stress patterns of spoken language.

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Wikidata facts

Image: The International Phonetic Alphabet (2015 version) (cropped) (only vowels).svg

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Commons category: Vowels
Stack Exchange tag: linguistics.stackexchange.com/tags/vowels

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~39 min read

Article

25 sections

Contents

Definition
Backness
Roundedness
Front, raised and retracted
Nasalization
Phonation
Tenseness
Tongue root position
Secondary narrowings in the vocal tract
Rhotic vowels
Reduced vowels
Acoustics
Prosody and intonation
Monophthongs, diphthongs, triphthongs
Written vowels
Shifts
Audio samples
Systems
Words without vowels
Words consisting of only vowels
See also
Notes
References
Bibliography
External links

The word vowel comes from the Latin 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 .