Open-mid central unrounded vowel

IPA Number	326
Audio sample
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Encoding
X-SAMPA	3
Image

The open-mid central unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɜ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is 3. Note that the IPA symbol is not the number "3", but a reversed epsilon.

Features

• Its vowel height is open-mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between an open vowel and a mid vowel.
• Its vowel backness is central, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel.
• Its vowel roundedness is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
English	RP	[[[English orthography|bird]]] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)	[bɜːd]	'bird'	In (non-RP) rhotic dialects, [ɜː] occurs in a rhotacized form in stressed syllables.
	Ohio	bust	[bɜst]	'bust'	The most common realization of the vowel transcribed as < ʌ > in American English.
	most of Texas
Paicĩ		[mbʷɜ̄]		'remainder'

Bibliography

• Ladefoged, Peter. (1993). A course in phonetics (3rd ed.). Fort Worth: Harcourt College Publishers.
• Template:Harvard reference
• Thomas, Erik R. (2001), An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English, Publication of the American Dialect Society, vol. 85, Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society, ISSN 0002-8207