Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Open central unrounded vowel

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IPA number
  
304 415

Unicode (hex)
  
U+0061 U+0308

Entity (decimal)
  
a​̈

X-SAMPA
  
a_" or a_- or A_" or 6_o

The open central unrounded vowel, or low central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in many spoken languages. While the International Phonetic Alphabet officially has no dedicated letter for this sound between front [a] and back [ɑ], it is normally written ⟨a⟩. If precision is required, it can be specified by using diacritics, such as centralized ⟨ä⟩ or retracted ⟨a̠⟩, but this is not common.

Contents

Acoustically, however, [a] is an extra-low central vowel. It is more common to use plain [a] for an open central vowel and, if needed, [æ] (officially near-open front vowel) for an open front vowel. Alternatively, Sinologists may use the letter ⟨ᴀ⟩ (small capital A). The IPA voted against officially adopting this symbol in 2011–2012.

The Hamont dialect of Limburgish has been reported to contrast long open front, central and back unrounded vowels, which is extremely unusual.

The IPA prefers terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. However, some linguists prefer the terms "high" and "low".

Features

  • Its vowel height is open, also known as low, which means the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth – that is, as low as possible in the mouth.
  • Its vowel backness is central, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel. This often subsumes open (low) front vowels, because the tongue does not have as much flexibility in positioning as it does for the close (high) vowels; the difference between an open front vowel and an open back vowel is equal to the difference between a close front and a close central vowel, or a close central and a close back vowel.
  • It is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.

    • Occurrence

    Most languages have some form of an unrounded open vowel. Because the IPA uses ⟨a⟩ for both front and central unrounded open vowels, it is not always clear whether a particular language uses the former or the latter.

    References

    Open central unrounded vowel Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA