Front rounded vowel
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Legend: unrounded • rounded |
A front rounded vowel is a particular type of vowel that is both front and rounded.
The front rounded vowels defined by the IPA include:
- [y], a close front rounded vowel (or "high front rounded vowel")
- [ʏ], a near-close front rounded vowel (or "near-high ...")
- [ø], a close-mid front rounded vowel (or "high-mid ...")
- [ø̞], a mid front rounded vowel
- [œ], an open-mid front rounded vowel (or "low-mid ...")
- [ɶ], an open front rounded vowel (or "low ...")
Front rounded vowels are cross-linguistically relatively uncommon, but occur in a number of well-known languages, including French, German, Turkish and Mandarin.
The high vowel [y] is the most common, while the low vowel [ɶ] is extremely rare. This is consistent with the general correlation between rounding and vowel height.
Language families in which front-rounded vowels are common are:
- Some Sino-Tibetan languages:
- Chinese varieties (e.g. Mandarin including Standard Chinese; Cantonese; Shanghainese)
- Standard Tibetan
- Various Indo-European languages:
- Modern Germanic languages (with the notable exceptions of the largest dialects of Modern English (although [yː] for /uː/ is found in some accents in Northern England, and [øː] is a common South African realization of /ɜː/), and some Alemannic German dialects)
- Gallo-Romance languages (except Catalan), a subset of the Romance languages (e.g. French, Occitan, Lombard)
- Albanian
- Ancient Greek
- Turkic languages (e.g. Turkish, Azerbaijani)
- Mongolic languages (e.g. Kalmyk, Inner Mongolian dialects; but not standard Khalkha)
- Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian)