subject: Vowel Sound Formation [print this page] When talking about vowels, the average person refers to them by their letter names - a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y. What if your goal is to talk about the actual sounds that the vowels make? If you just speak about the letter "e" it is hard to explain the different sounds that "e" represents. For instance, "e" represents two different sounds (and in one case no sound at all) in "pet" and "pete". To add to the confusion, in many dialects of English the letter "e" often represents the same sound as the letter "i" as with "scene" and "sing".
Additionally, some languages do not use letters to represent the sounds they make. For instance, Chinese uses symbols to represent the entire word. In Chinese there would not be a simple way of representing just the "i" sound in "ming".
Instead of using the letter names to describe the sound, vowel sounds can be accurately described based upon how the sound is formed. The two main features of a vowel sound are the height of the speaker's tongue or jaw and the placement of the tongue in the speaker's mouth.
Placement of Tongue in Mouth
Another feature of vowels is how far back the tongue is in the speaker's mouth when the sound is made. A speaker pushes their tongue forward when they say the /i/ in "ring", but pulls their tongue back when pronouncing the /'/ in "father". This feature of vowels is referred to as backness. Vowels can be labeled front (like /i/ or /e/), central (as /a/) or back (like /o/ or /u/) depending upon where the tongue is in the mouth when the sound is made.
Putting it Together
Describing a vowel sound by only height or only backness would not be specific enough. If you said the sound was a high vowel you could be referring to multiple sounds (e.g. /i/ or /u/). Similarly if you said it was a back sound you could mean /o/ or /u/. Instead, these features should be considered components of a vowel sound - both are required to describe the exact sound. If you put any two features together, you will arrive at a vowel. For instance, rather than talking about "the vowel in scene", we can be exact and refer to the "close front vowel". It helps if you think of these features as two axes on a chart. Backness is on the x-axis and height is on the y-axis.
Height of Tongue or Jaw
The first step in describing a vowel sound is considering the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the speaker's mouth when the vowel is pronounced. When saying the word "ring" the speaker's tongue is closer to the roof of their mouth than it is when they say the vowel in "raw". This is known as vowel height. Vowels can be classed as high (like /i/ or /u/), mid (like /e/ or /o/) or low (like /a/) depending on how high the tongue is in the speaker's mouth.
Another way of thinking about it is to consider the jaw instead. When pronouncing the phoneme /'/ in "father", the speaker's mouth is open much wider than when pronouncing the /u/ in "prune". If you are using this method to describe vowels they can be classed as close (again, as /i/ or /u/), mid (again, as /e/ or /o/) or open (again, like /a/). This means that close and high are describing the same thing as are open and low.
Using a combination of height and backness you can accurately describe a vowel sound in any language, even if it is a sound made in a language that doesn't have any letters at all!
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