Puneet Varma (Editor)

Mid back unrounded vowel

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IPA number
  
315 430

Unicode (hex)
  
U+0264 U+031E

Entity (decimal)
  
ɤ​̞

Mid back unrounded vowel

The mid back unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Acoustically it is a mid back-central unrounded vowel. Although there is no dedicated symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the exact mid back unrounded vowel between close-mid [ɤ] and open-mid [ʌ] because no language is known to distinguish all three, ⟨ɤ⟩ is normally used. If more precision is desired, diacritics can be used, such as ⟨ɤ̞⟩ or ⟨ʌ̝⟩.

Features

  • Its vowel height is mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between a close vowel and an open vowel.
  • Its vowel backness is back, which means the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Note that unrounded back vowels tend to be centralized, which means that often they are in fact near-back.
  • It is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.

    • References

    Mid back unrounded vowel Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA