Back vowel

This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark vowels because they are perceived as sounding darker than the front vowels.[1]

Near-back vowels are essentially a type of back vowels; no language is known to contrast back and near-back vowels based on backness alone.

The category "back vowel" comprises both raised vowels and retracted vowels.

Articulation

In their articulation, back vowels do not form a single category, but may be either raised vowels such as [u] or retracted vowels such as [ɑ].[2]

Partial list

The back vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

There also are back vowels that do not have dedicated symbols in the IPA:

As here, other back vowels can be transcribed with diacritics of relative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels, such as ⟨u̞⟩, ⟨o̝⟩ or ⟨ʊ̠⟩ for a near-close back rounded vowel.

Occurrence

According to PHOIBLE, the most common phonemic back vowel is /u/, occurring in approximately 88% of languages, while the most uncommon phonemic back vowel is /ɒ/, occurring in only 2% of recorded inventories.

Back vowel occurrences[3]
Vowel %
/u/ 88
/o/ 60
/ɔ/ 35
/ʊ/ 14
/ɑ/ 7
/ɯ/ 6
/ʌ/ 4
/ɤ/ 3
/ɒ/ 2

See also

References

  1. ^ Tsur, Reuven (February 1992). The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception. Duke University Press. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-8223-1170-6.
  2. ^ Scott Moisik, Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, & John H. Esling (2012) "The Epilaryngeal Articulator: A New Conceptual Tool for Understanding Lingual-Laryngeal Contrasts"
  3. ^ Steven Moran and Daniel McCloy, ed. (2019). PHOIBLE 2.0. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.