Vowels

American English has a rather rich vowel inventory that covers many of the positions on the vowel grid; however, there are many other possibilities that are found in other languages. UPSID (UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database) (Maddieson 1984), which looks at more than 300 languages that are representative of different language families, shows a grid with 37 different vowel symbols. We will not go into that much detail here.

Instead, we will first point out some non-English vowels that are common in several familiar languages, and then we will give a brief description of ‘cardinal vowels’, which are commonly used for reference points in talking about the vowels of other languages.

Although it is commonplace to find front vowels as unrounded, there are some front rounded vowels that are found in several familiar languages. These are high front rounded, /y/ (/ü/) (the rounded counterpart of /i/), high-mid (close-mid) front rounded, /ø/ (/ö/) (the rounded counterpart of /e/), and low-mid (open-mid) front rounded, /œ/ (the rounded counterpart of /ε/). All three are part of French and several Germanic languages (German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian). Hungarian has /y/ and /ø/, while Cantonese and Turkish have /y/ and /œ/. Another noteworthy vowel that is not part of English is the high back unrounded /ɯ/ (unrounded counterpart of /u/), which is found in Korean, Turkish, and many Amerindian languages.