Back vowel

A back vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark vowels because they are perceived as sounding darker than the front vowels.[1]

Near-back vowels are essentially a type of back vowels; no language is known to contrast back and near-back vowels based on backness alone.

Articulation

In their articulation, back vowels do not form a single category, but may be either raised vowels such as [u] or retracted vowels such as [ɑ].[2]

Partial list

The back vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

There also are back vowels that don't have dedicated symbols in the IPA:

  • close back compressed vowel [ɯᵝ] or [uᵝ]
  • near-close back unrounded vowel [ɯ̽] or [ʊ̜]
  • near-close back compressed vowel [ɯ̽ᵝ] or [ʊᵝ]
  • close-mid back compressed vowel [ɤᵝ] or [oᵝ]
  • mid back unrounded vowel [ɤ̞] or [ʌ̝]
  • mid back rounded vowel [o̞] or [ɔ̝]

As here, other back vowels can be transcribed with diacritics of relative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels, such as ⟨u̞⟩, ⟨o̝⟩ or ⟨ʊ̟⟩ for a near-close back rounded vowel.

gollark: Bye then, enjoy your whatever.
gollark: It seems to *mostly* be the US.
gollark: I mean, extreme poverty and such are going *down* in most countries, and literacy and good things like that are going up.
gollark: Also that.
gollark: Depends what you mean by "communism"?

See also

References
  1. Tsur, Reuven (February 1992). The Poetic Mode of Speech Perception. Duke University Press. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-8223-1170-6.
  2. Scott Moisik, Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, & John H. Esling (2012) "The Epilaryngeal Articulator: A New Conceptual Tool for Understanding Lingual-Laryngeal Contrasts"


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