Vowel

Vowels are a special kind of speech sound. They are one of the two main classes of sounds we use to talk. The other class is called a consonant. When you say a vowel, the air flows freely through your mouth. It does not get stuck or blocked by your teeth or lips.

This makes vowels the center of most syllables. Scientists call this center the nucleus. Vowels can change in many ways. They can be loud or soft. They can also be long or short. The word vowel comes from a Latin word meaning vocal. This shows how these sounds are tied to your voice.

Making a vowel is a smooth process. You use your mouth and throat to shape the sound. In a phonetic definition, a vowel is an oral sound. This means the air must escape through your mouth. The air also escapes along the middle of your tongue. This is called being median. There is no big build-up of air pressure in your throat. This is different from a consonant like "sh." A consonant has a closure or a squeeze in the vocal tract. Vowels are also described by how they work in a syllable. This is called a phonological definition. In many languages, the vowel forms the peak of the syllable.

People have studied these sounds for a very long time. A man named Daniel Jones created a system to describe them. He used something called cardinal vowels to help explain sounds. He looked at how the tongue moves to change a sound. He used three main ideas to describe them. These are tongue height, tongue backness, and lip rounding.

Later, a scientist named Peter Ladefogred shared a new idea. He said people were not just describing tongue position. They were actually describing something called formant frequencies. This helped us understand how we hear the differences between sounds.

There are many ways to measure a vowel. One way is height, which is the vertical position of the tongue. High vowels like "i" have the tongue close to the roof of the mouth. Low vowels like "a" have the jaw open and the tongue down low.

Another way is backness, which is the horizontal position. Front vowels have the tongue forward in the mouth. Back vowels have the tongue toward the back. Some languages use many levels of height. The Kensiu language in Malaysia and Thailand is very unusual. It uses many different levels of height to tell vowels apart. Most languages use height as the main way to make different vowels.

Lips also play a big part in how we speak. This is called roundedness. Some vowels use rounded lips to change the sound. In some sounds, the lips push out. This is called endolabial rounding. In other sounds, the lips pull in or compress. This is called exolabial rounding. For example, the Japanese sound "u" is exolabial. It sounds different from the English "u" sound. Some languages like Swedish and Norwegian use both types of rounding to make different sounds. By moving our tongues and lips, we can make a huge variety of sounds.