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Unit 7: Vowels and Its Phonetic Transcription

Low vowels are those where the tongue is not raised at all, but rather lowered from its resting position: Notes
when you produce a low vowel, you will be able to feel your mouth opening and your jaw dropping,
even if it is not very easy to figure out quite what your tongue is doing. Low vowels are given in (5).
5. Low vowels
SSBE GA
trap a F

lot Y+
palm Y+ Y+
Again, there is a further class intermediate between high and low, namely the mid vowels, shown in
(6). These can if necessary be further subclassified as high mid (like the face and goat vowels) or low
mid (like the dress, thought, strut vowels) depending on whether they are nearer the high end of the
scale, or nearer the low end.
6. Mid vowels
SSBE GA
face ew ew
goat o• o+
dress e e
lot Z
thought ]+ ]+
about c c
nurse f+ fr
strut • •

Lip position
In the high back [u+] vowel of goose, there is tongue raising in the region of the soft palate; but in
addition, the lips are rounded. Vowels in any of the previous categories may be either rounded,
where the lips are protruded forwards, or unrounded, where the lips may be either in a neutral
position, or sometimes slightly spread (as for a high front vowel, like [i+] fleece). However, it is
overwhelmingly more common cross-linguistically for back vowels to be rounded than for
front ones, and for high vowels to be rounded than low ones; this is borne out in English, as you can
see in (7).
7. Rounded vowels
SSBE GA
lot Z
foot • •
thought ]+ ]+
goat o• o+
goose u+ u+
Length
Using these three dimensions of frontness, height and rounding, we can now define the vowel in
fleece as high, front and unrounded; that in goose as high, back and rounded; and the unstressed
vowel of about, schwa, as mid, central and unrounded. However, our elementary descriptions would
class the kit vowel as high, front and unrounded, and the foot vowel as high, back and rounded; these
labels make them indistinguishable from the clearly different vowels of fleece and goose respectively.
SSBE and GA speakers very readily perceive the fleece and kit vowels, and the goose and foot vowels,
as different; and there are plenty of minimal pairs to support a phoneme distinction, as in peat-pit,

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