Close mid central rounded vowel

The close-mid central rounded vowel, or high-mid central rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɵ⟩, a lowercase barred letter o, and should not be confused with the Greek letter theta, ⟨θ⟩, which in IPA corresponds to a consonant sound, the voiceless dental fricative. It was added to the IPA in 1993; before that, this vowel was transcribed ⟨ö⟩.

Contents

• Features
• Occurrence
• References

The IPA prefers terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. However, a large number of linguists, perhaps a majority, prefer the terms "high" and "low".

The character ɵ has been used in several Latin-derived alphabets such as the one for Yañalif, but in that language it denotes a different sound than it does in the IPA. The character is homographic with Cyrillic Ө. The Unicode code point is U+019F Ɵ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH MIDDLE TILDE (HTML Ɵ).

This sound rarely contrasts with the near-close near-front rounded vowel. For this reason, it may be sometimes transcribed with the symbol ⟨ʏ⟩. An example of a language contrasting /ɵ/ with /ʏ/ is the Hamont dialect of Limburgish, but in phonemic transcription, the sounds are normally transcribed with /ʏ/ and /y/, respectively.

The physically possible close-mid central compressed vowel has not been reported to occur in any language, but could be transcribed as a centralized close-mid front rounded vowel [ø̈], which is normally compressed. Other possible transcriptions are ⟨ɘ͡β̞⟩⟩ (simultaneous [ɘ] and labial compression) and [ɘᵝ] ([ɘ] modified with labial compression).