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Unit 7: Vowels and Its Phonetic Transcription

Finally, SSBE has a third set of diphthongs, which are known as the centring diphthongs as they all Notes
have the mid central vowel schwa as the second element. These centring diphthongs developed
historically before /r/, which was then lost following vowels in the ancestor of SSBE; they consequently
appear mainly where there is an <r> in the spelling, although they have now been generalised to
some other words, like idea.
GA speakers have a diphthong in idea, but still pronounce the historical [ ] in near, square, force, cure
and therefore lack centring diphthongs in these words.
r
12. Centring diphthongs
SSBE GA
near wc ir
square ec er
force ]c/]+ o+r
cure •c • r
7.3 Vowel Classification

The labels outlined in the previous section are helpful, but may leave questions unresolved when
used in comparisons between different languages or different accents of the same language. Thus,
French [u+] in rouge is very close in quality to English [u+] in goose, but not identical; the French vowel
is a little more peripheral, slightly higher and more back. Similarly, [o+] in rose for a GA speaker is
slightly lower and more centralised than ‘the same’ vowel for a speaker of Scottish English. None of
the descriptors introduced so far would allow us to make these distinctions clear, since in the systems
of the languages or accents concerned, these pairs of vowels would quite appropriately be described
as long, high, back and rounded, or long, high-mid, back and rounded respectively.
Furthermore, a classification of this sort, based essentially on articulation, is arguably less appropriate
for vowels than for consonants. In uttering a vowel, the important thing is to produce a particular sort
of auditory impression, so that someone listening understands which vowel in the system you are
aiming at; but it does not especially matter which articulatory strategies you use to convey that auditory
impression. If you were asked to produce an [u+], but not allowed to round your lips, then with a certain
amount of practice you could make at least something very similar; and yet it would not be a rounded
vowel in the articulatory sense, although you would have modified the shape of your vocal tract to
make it sound like one. This is not possible with most consonants, where the auditory impression
depends on the particular articulators used, and how close they get, not just the overall shape of the
vocal tract and the effect that has on a passing airstream. It is true that the whole oral tract is a continuum,
but it is easier to see the places for consonants as definite ‘stopping off places’ along that continuum,
helped by the fact that most consonants are obstruents, and we can feel what articulators are involved.
One possible solution is to abandon an articulatory approach to vowel classification altogether, and
turn instead to an analysis of the speech wave itself: but acoustic phonetics is beyond the scope of this
book. In any case, it is true that most speakers of particular accents or even languages will produce
certain vowels in an articulatorily similar fashion. For comparative purposes, what we need is an
approach which allows vowel qualities to be expressed as relative rather than absolute values.
We can achieve this comparative perspective by plotting vowels on a diagram rather than simply
defining them in isolation. The diagram conventionally used for this purpose is known as the Vowel
Quadrilateral, and is an idealised representation of the vowel space, roughly between palatal and
velar, where vowels can be produced in the vocal tract. The left edge corresponds to the palatal area,
and hence to front vowels, and the right edge to the velar area, and back vowels. The top line extends
slightly further than the bottom one because there is physically more space along the roof of the
mouth than along the base. Finally, the chart is conventionally divided into six sectors, allowing
high, high-mid, low-mid and low vowels to be plotted, as well as front, central and back ones. There
is no way of reading information on rounding directly from the vowel quadrilateral, so that vowels
are typically plotted using an IPA symbol rather than a dot; it is essential to learn these IPA symbols
to see which refer to rounded, and which to unrounded vowels. The SSBE and GA monophthongs

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