Open front unrounded vowel
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| Vowels | |||||
| front | near-front | central | near-back | back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| close | • | • | • | ||
| near-close | • | ||||
| close-mid | • | • | • | ||
| mid | |||||
| open-mid | • | • | • | ||
| near-open | |||||
| open | • | • | |||
| Table of vowels - List of vowels | |||||
The open central unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is a.
Features
- Its vowel height is open, which means the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth.
- Its vowel backness is front which means the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. There are no central open vowels because the tongue does not have as much flexibility in positioning as it does for the close vowels; as such the difference between an open front vowel and an open back vowel is equal to the difference between a close front vowel or a close back vowel and a close mid vowel.
- Its vowel roundedness is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.
Occurs in
All languages have some form of an unrounded open vowel. For languages that only have a single low vowel, the symbol for this vowel (a) is usually used because it is the only low vowel whose symbol is part of the basic Latin alphabet.
- Danish: bade , 'bathe'
- French: rat , 'rat'
- German: ratte , 'rat'
- Hungarian: bal , 'left'
- Spanish: rata , 'rat'
In the English dialects of RP and GA, this vowel occurs only as the first part of the diphthongs , as in light , buy ; and , as in how , pout . However, in the Great Lakes region, this vowel occurs in words like stock as a result of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; in many varieties of Canadian English, it occurs in words like bat as a result of the Canadian Shift.ko:전설 비원순 저모음