vowel
Sign in to saveA vowel () is a speech sound pronounced without any in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, loudness, and length. They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress. The nucleus, or "center", of a syllable typically consists of a vowel sound (though this is not always the case).
AI overview
A vowel is a speech sound made without any obstruction in the vocal tract, and it forms one of the two main categories of speech sounds along with consonants. Vowels are important because they typically form the core of syllables and help create the rhythm, pitch, and stress patterns of spoken language.
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Article
25 sectionsContents
- Definition
- Backness
- Roundedness
- Front, raised and retracted
- Nasalization
- Phonation
- Tenseness
- Tongue root position
- Secondary narrowings in the vocal tract
- Rhotic vowels
- Reduced vowels
- Acoustics
- Prosody and intonation
- Monophthongs, diphthongs, triphthongs
- Written vowels
- Shifts
- Audio samples
- Systems
- Words without vowels
- Words consisting of only vowels
- See also
- Notes
- References
- Bibliography
- External links
A vowel () is a speech sound pronounced without any in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, loudness, and length. They are usually voiced and are closely involved in prosodic variation such as tone, intonation and stress. The nucleus, or "center", of a syllable typically consists of a vowel sound (though this is not always the case).
The word vowel comes from the Latin word , meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). In English, the word vowel is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them: , , , , , and sometimes , and .