The open front rounded vowel, or low front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that has not been confirmed to be phonetic in any spoken language, but is occasionally used in phonemic transcriptions for some Germanic languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a small capital . It was added to the IPA vowel chart to balance the quadrilateral by filling in the remaining gap for a rounded equivalent of .
While the IPA chart lists this vowel as the rounded equivalent of , studies of formant acoustics suggest it is closer to the rounded homologue of .
A phoneme transcribed with is reported for the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian; however, it is phonetically , pairing with unrounded phonemic (phonetic ). Similarly, certain studies of Danish and Swedish use to transcribe a phoneme that is phonetically open-mid or (depending on the analysis), where phonemic is phonetically raised closer to . In Maastrichtian Limburgish, the vowel transcribed with in the Mestreechter Taol dictionary is phonetically centralized, with a height between open-mid and near-open ; phonologically, it is the counterpart of .
Features
Occurrence
No language has been reported to have a phonetically true open realization. The table below provides examples of near-open realizations (thus being rounded homologues of , i.e. a near-open front rounded vowel), which are phonetically raised compared to cardinal , and also often centralized (similar to , but not as central). In the case of the latter, these may be transcribed as mid-centralized (alternatively, or ).
{| class="wikitable" style="clear: both;"
! colspan=2 | Language !! Word !! IPA!! Meaning !! Notes
|-
| Danish || Some speakers || || || 'green' || Near-open and centralized; allophone of between and (), and of between and a nasal; though becoming in the latter environments. Historically also an allophone of before , but likewise has merged to . May instead be analyzed as open-mid . See Danish phonology
|-
| Limburgish || Weert dialect || || || 'shower' || Near-open and centralized; allophone of before in non-diphthong sequences. See Weert dialect phonology
|-
| Swedish || Stockholm || || || 'ear' || Near-open; realization of the phoneme (which recommend transcribing instead as ). Corresponds to in Linköping and Lund dialects. An acoustic study by points instead to a potentially open-mid central realization . See Swedish phonology
|}
See also
- Index of phonetics articles