A front rounded vowel is a particular type of vowel that is both front and rounded.
The front rounded vowels defined by the IPA include:
[y], a close front rounded vowel (or "high front rounded vowel")
[ʏ], a near-close near-front rounded vowel (or "near-high ...")
[ø], a close-mid front rounded vowel (or "high-mid ...")
[ø̞], a mid front rounded vowel
[œ], an open-mid front rounded vowel (or "low-mid ...")
[ɶ], an open front rounded vowel (or "low ...")
Front rounded vowels are cross-linguistically relatively uncommon, but occur in a number of well-known languages, including French, German and Chinese.
The high vowel [y] is the most common, while the low vowel [ɶ] is extremely rare. This is consistent with the general correlation between rounding and vowel height.
Language families in which front-rounded vowels are common are:
Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g. Standard Chinese, Standard Tibetan)
Various Indo-European languages:
most Germanic languages
Gallo-Romance languages, a subset of the Romance languages (e.g. French, Occitan, Lombard)
Albanian
Ancient Greek
Turkic languages
Mongolic languages
Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian)
