IPA number 312 Unicode (hex) U+0276 Kirshenbaum a. | Entity (decimal) ɶ X-SAMPA & | |
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The open front rounded vowel, or low front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, not confirmed to be phonemic in any spoken languages. Acoustically it is an open or low near-front rounded vowel, a rounded equivalent of [æ], rather than [a]. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɶ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is &. The letter ⟨ɶ⟩ is a small caps rendition of ⟨Œ⟩. Note that ⟨œ⟩, the lowercase version of the ligature, is used for the open-mid front rounded vowel.
Contents
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".
Riad (2014) reports that [ɶː] in Stockholm Swedish is sometimes difficult to distinguish from [ɒː]. He states that it is "a sign that these vowels are phonetically very close".
Features
Occurrence
A phoneme generally transcribed by this symbol is reported from the Amstetten dialect of Austro-Bavarian German. However, phonetically it is open-mid, i.e. [œ].
It occurs allophonically in Danish, Weert Limburgish and some speakers of Swedish.