A spectrogram of an utterance of Secondary Cardinal Vowel 2 - close-mid front rounded

INDEX

 

Michael Ashby & John Maidment

Introducing Phonetic Science

Chapter 5: Vowels

Chapter Summary

Vowels are produced when vocal fold vibration excites the resonances of the vocal tract. The excitation spectrum is filtered by the vocal tract, giving rise to peaks in the output spectrum which are known as formants. The patterning of three lowest frequency formants essentially determines vowel quality. This patterning can be related to the articulatory features of vowels (height, location, lip position). Vowels may be long or short, and may be monophthongs or diphthongs. The auditory properties of vowels can be related to a diagram known as the vowel quadrilateral, and fixed landmark qualities in the quadrilateral are known as cardinal vowels. Symbols for these, together with additional symbols and diacritics permit the transcription of vowel qualities.

Languages make use of the basic vowel features in a wide variety of ways.  Vowel systems range from the very small with only three vowels to the quite large with 10 or more vowels. Some languages increase the size of their vowel inventory by the use of modifications such as nasalisation, length distinctions and the addition of diphthongs.

Vowels change over time more rapidly than consonants do and vowels can differ quite significantly from one accent of a language to another. Two accents may have different vowel systems.  They may differ in the lexical incidence of vowels and the precise phonetic qualities of equivalent vowels may differ.