The open front rounded vowel, or low front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that has not been confirmed to be phonetic in any spoken language, but is occasionally used in phonemic transcriptions for some Germanic languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a small capital . It was added to the IPA vowel chart to balance the quadrilateral by filling in the remaining gap for a rounded equivalent of .

While the IPA chart lists this vowel as the rounded equivalent of , studies of formant acoustics suggest it is closer to the rounded homologue of .

A phoneme transcribed with is reported for the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian; however, it is phonetically open-mid , pairing with unrounded phonemic (phonetic ). Similarly, certain studies of Danish and Swedish use to transcribe a phoneme that is phonetically open-mid or near-open (depending on the analysis), where phonemic is phonetically raised closer to mid . In Maastrichtian Limburgish, the vowel transcribed with in the Mestreechter Taol dictionary is phonetically centralized, with a height between open-mid and near-open ; phonologically, it is the long counterpart of .

Some phoneticians, such as Geoffrey K. Pullum, have argued that the co-occurrence of a fully open articulation with rounded lips is a phonetic impossibility. Following the 1989 Kiel Convention, Pullum wrote the following semi-jocular remark:

Features

Occurrence

No language has been reported to conclusively have a phonetically true open realization. The table below mainly provides examples of near-open realizations (thus being rounded homologues of , i.e. a near-open front rounded vowel), which are phonetically raised compared to cardinal , and also often centralized (similar to , but not as central). In the case of the latter, these may be transcribed as mid-centralized (alternatively, or ).

See also

• Index of phonetics articles

Notes

References

External links