Puneet Varma (Editor)

Open mid front rounded vowel

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IPA number
  
311

Unicode (hex)
  
U+0153

Kirshenbaum
  
W

Entity (decimal)
  
œ

X-SAMPA
  
9

Open-mid front rounded vowel

The open-mid front rounded vowel, or low-mid front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Acoustically it is an open-mid front-central rounded vowel. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨œ⟩. The symbol œ is a lowercase ligature of the letters o and e. Note that ⟨ɶ⟩, a small caps version of the ⟨Œ⟩ ligature, is used for a distinct vowel sound: the open 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".

Open-mid front compressed vowel

The open-mid front compressed vowel is typically transcribed in IPA simply as ⟨œ⟩, and that is the convention used in this article. There is no dedicated diacritic for compression in the IPA. However, the compression of the lips can be shown with the letter ⟨β̞⟩ as ⟨ɛ͡β̞⟩ (simultaneous [ɛ] and labial compression) or ⟨ɛᵝ⟩ ([ɛ] modified with labial compression). The spread-lip diacritic ⟨  ͍ ⟩ may also be used with a rounded vowel letter ⟨œ͍⟩ as an ad hoc symbol, though technically 'spread' means unrounded.

Features

  • Its vowel height is open-mid, also known as low-mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between an open vowel (a low vowel) and a mid vowel.
  • Its vowel backness is front, which means the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Note that rounded front vowels are often centralized, which means that often they are in fact near-front.
  • Its roundedness is compressed, which means that the margins of the lips are tense and drawn together in such a way that the inner surfaces are not exposed.

    • Open-mid front protruded vowel

    Catford notes that most languages with rounded front and back vowels use distinct types of labialization, protruded back vowels and compressed front vowels. However, a few languages, such as Scandinavian ones, have protruded front vowels. One of these, Swedish, even contrasts the two types of rounding in front vowels (see near-close near-front rounded vowel, with Swedish examples of both types of rounding).

    As there are no diacritics in the IPA to distinguish protruded and compressed rounding, an old diacritic for labialization, ⟨  ̫⟩, will be used here as an ad hoc symbol for protruded front vowels. Another possible transcription is ⟨œʷ⟩ or ⟨ɛʷ⟩ (an open-mid front vowel modified by endolabialization), but this could be misread as a diphthong.

    Acoustically, this sound is "between" the more typical compressed open-mid front vowel [œ] and the unrounded open-mid front vowel [ɛ].

    Features

  • Its vowel height is open-mid, also known as low-mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between an open vowel (a low vowel) and a mid vowel.
  • Its vowel backness is front, which means the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Note that rounded front vowels are often centralized, which means that often they are in fact near-front.
  • Its roundedness is protruded, which means that the corners of the lips are drawn together, and the inner surfaces exposed.

    • References

    Open-mid front rounded vowel Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA