Phonetics - Vowels: Crash Course Linguistics #9

In English, we have 5 (well, sometimes 6) vowel letters, but way more vowel sounds. That’s where the IPA can help us! In this episode of Crash Course Linguistics, we’ll learn about vowels, those sounds you can sing with your mouth open, and how we can represent them clearly using the IPA.
Want even more linguistics? Check out the Lingthusiasm podcast, hosted by the writers of Crash Course Linguistics: lingthusiasm.com/
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[@pallavgoyal482]

"No longer disemvoweled." Love it!

[@cheyennemarie7075]

4:38 “dude” 😂😂

[@eifelitorn]

where's my car

[@andruabeck7236]

When a teacher enjoys teaching, then the student also enjoys studying. Good job, Taylor! :)

[@luoessouzo4940]

Yeah that's a real case, students feel.

[@Dougiewoof]

That is very true, one of the worst things for a student is a teacher who hates their job.

[@ninreck5121]

This playlist is being made at exactly the right time, I'm studying English and I had this topic this week in class so I just sent this video and the one on consonants to some friends who had trouble understanding it during the lecture

[@omarabdelkadereldarir7458]

I remember wondering about this stuff and trying to distinguish between each sound on my own. Lovely to learn there's a whole branch of science devoted to it!

[@solar0wind]

Me too! Or all the time I wondered how drinking through a straw works. How exactly do I pull up the water through the straw with my mouth? I think I finally figured it out, but it's kinda hard because the things you do so naturally are hard to get behind I think.

[@matheusb4621]

I can't stress enough how much I love this channel and specifically this series, I've recommended it to students, peers and former professors of mine. Thank you so much for the great work and content 😊😊

[@matheusb4621]

P.s. I wish I had these Phonetic videos when I was studying Phonetic and Phonology in my undergrad.

[@amanichj7079]

EXACTLY WHAT I NEED AT THE EXACT TIME!!! Crash Course really out here being better than school and saving our gradess

[@dgo792]

I really like these. I feel like i learn a lot and look foward for them every friday. Thanks Taylor & co

[@TiggerIsMyCat]

Despite technically being spelled as diphthong, (and it being the original greek pronunciation), I have never heard anyone actually pronounce it that way until now. It's fascinating. I remember a few years ago doing a bunch of research on the pronunciation because Hank Green made a video about mistakes he discovered he was making, and one was pronouncing it as though it were dipthong, and I wanted to show it wasn't really wrong. This word is fascinating! (And for the record, I found that phonotactically, English tends to not like having two fricatives next to each other, but it was fine in ancient greek, so a lot of words we borrowed from greek, like diphthong, have those two fricatives next to each other and we English speakers tend to turn one of the fricatives into a stop, because that's more phonotactically appropriate for English. Often do the same with words like ophthalmologist or diphtheria, which are also often pronounced as pth rather than phth)

[@mattkuhn6634]

Man all this talk about vowels and diphthongs has me jazzed to talk about coarticulation! I hope we get into that more next episode. If I wasn't doing computational linguistics, I'd probably be doing phonology for sure. Can't wait!

[@scotthendricks5665]

Australian English has 20 vowels Me: *What* pronounced woooaaah

[@Tfin]

20 vowels, and not even that many distinct consonant sounds... until you get into diphthongs.

[@sarahlamoureux1454]

Are we invited to the fancy vowel party? Looks classy.

[@steevemartial4084]

This is increasingly complex and awesome. I love it!

[@artsyjames]

Nasalisation is something French learners struggle with a lot, in my experience as a French native. I hear the lack of it often when listening to English natives speaking French. It does make a difference, like in the beau/bon examples: it makes a different word and can lead to confusion when omitted.

[@PoseidonXIII]

This helped so much click into place for me! I greatly appreciate all the work that went in to making this truly awesome series.

[@lagautmd]

This is fabu! I've loved linguistics since I took a course as an undergraduate. Sometimes, I wish I'd gone on to study it in graduate school.

[@evelynzhai1440]

I’ve been waiting for like a month 💗💗

[@gelbadayah.sneach579]

As a linguistics enthusiast, I'm really enjoying this series! Learning the proper pronunciations of the IPA is something I've been aching to do and there really aren't a lot of videos out there telling how to do it in such a digestible manner. A lot of web sites give examples of words that use the sounds represented by the IPA symbols; but having met folks from the entire East Cost of the United States and multiple regions of the UK, I know about three to five various pronunciations for each example work given! Thanks for making this series, Crash Course crew!

[@SotraEngine4]

Well They're pretty inconsistent with what [u] means

[@pablomorralla3256]

i got SO excited when i saw the notification, THANK U

[@ArturoStojanoff]

This is a very good video. Thank you and congratulations.

[@MathMadeEasy]

As a content creator myself I was trying to find math videos on Crash Course. I found a video called Mathematical Thinking, but I couldn’t find a playlist dedicated to Math. Have you already made a playlist like this or are you considering to make one in the future? 😊

[@crashcourse]

We did a playlist on algebra with ASU kzbin.info/www/bejne/jGebh5iGn5V5a6M I'd love to do more math in the future! - Hannah

[@vaughnjohnson8767]

@@crashcourse yeah, maybe a crash course Astrophysics? Or maybe a crash course history of sports! We were teased that in European history!

[@aaronhe6877]

@@vaughnjohnson8767 More like art history

[@ardasnnnn]

4:28 As a Turkish person I felt myself that I need to inform you about your /ɯ/ pronunciation(Which represented in Turkish Alphabet as lower-case "ı" and upper-case "I"). This sound is not pronounced this way and yours sounds like tense /i/ sound but apart from these, I really appreciate your work sincerely. You explain the logic of this phenomenon perfectly. Phonetics has became an important part of my life for a long time ago and your work is literally a treasure-chest I've found :)

[@Mienshao11]

Portuguese would’ve been a good example of nasal vowels

[@JoaoPessoa86]

I was waiting for that and got denied 😭 It's so hard to explain to my English first friends who just can't seem to wrap their heads and nasal passages around it

[@Deafdeafdeaf12]

I learnt IPA for my speech but I didn’t learn it enough to assist me, only enough for helping me to construct sounds. This video have taught me more and I had fun trying to create sounds! (Unfortunately I don’t have any auditory nerve in both of my ears, that means I cannot hear so I cannot achieve 100% fluency n English speech.)

[@jamieruwen4204]

i finally understand the vowel chart. thanks

[@alisardo1119]

Using Vowels is a genuine test to distinguish a native english speaker from others👍

[@laprankster3264]

Some people say /h/ is actually a type of voiceless vowel instead of a consonant (given that it is literally exhaling and doesn’t produce any real constriction).

[@levanalucard851]

Hi love the videos, is there anywhere i could find the a list of translations of all the word bubbles in the intro?

[@NeverDoubtTheWorm]

“Tthhhaaannnkkk Yyyooouuu Thought bubble” Ahahahahaha 🤣

[@guilhermeleal179]

hi please make a playlist teaching the english language from basic to advanced

[@dvdr14eb]

@6:07 vowel gang. au!

[@levipoon5684]

Ironically, her 馬/马 (horse) sounds more like 麻 (numb)...

[@ardasnnnn]

I checked it on Google Translate and I guess you are right even I'm Turkish :D

[@lahagemo]

well, tones are hard, so it’s not that surprising a non-native speaker (and i don’t think she’s even a speaker of mandarin) would make a mistake like that

[@jiakunliu473]

I haven't checked this, but the source of error might be that in the video they used pinyin way of marking tones, which uses the same symbols as IPA but uses they to mean different things

[@thethirdjegs]

Languages in MARITIME southeast asia has small vowel inventories. These languages belong to the malayo-polynesian family.

[@Tyler-yx5fx]

THANK YOU so much for releasing these videos! These IPA videos are very useful for choral music class. I'd love to include the phonetic videos into my lessons. :)

[@challalla]

I was slightly confused about Afro-Asiatic languages being included in the claim that languages across the equatorial zone of Africa have large vowel inventories, given that the language family includes Arabic, which is famously vowel-poor as stated in the video immediately afterwards. So I looked it up. Some Arabic varieties like Chadian Arabic and especially Juba Arabic in South Sudan are spoken in what could be described as the equatorial zone. Chadian Arabic and Juba Arabic have five vowels, which is actually typical for colloquial Arabic varieties, though Classical Arabic has just three vowels. In fact, a five-vowel system is the most common around the world, so it can be considered a medium-sized inventory. Most Afro-Asiatic languages in Africa excluding North Africa including Hausa, Beja, and Oromo have five vowels. Ethiopian Semitic languages like Amharic and Tigrinya have seven as do Tuareg languages, and Somali has ten. Seven and up can be considered large inventories. So most Afro-Asiatic languages in the region fall in the middle of the spectrum, with a few outliers that can be described as having large vowel inventories. It does seem like they would not have made the best example of languages with large vowel inventories on their own, but were included here because of their vowel-rich Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan neighbours.

[@Ismoista]

I wish you had mentioned vocal fry and breathiness when you talked about tones!

[@Jantsenpr777]

The best part of this video is the realization that "we are no longer 'disemvoweled.'" Hahaha! Funny one!

[@ioan_jivan]

Exquiste

[@ve2010]

This video helped me a lot with my speech and now I can see my R sonds better

[@awesomemilkshake6612]

Never been this early before! I'm excited to learn vowels :)

[@user-jp6vt2lz8z]

I like.

[@ancientswordrage]

Nuxalk comes close to being voweless I think?

[@user-ze7sj4qy6q]

great video, to avoid confusion thougj for anyone who sees this: at around 0:15, the character ɬ is highlighted blue, showing that it's voiced, and there's no voiceless equivalent next to it. however, in reality, ɬ is voiceless, and it's voiced equivalent is ɮ. hope this helps alleviate any confusion, and if you're new to linguistics, welcome :)

[@yesid17]

very brave of you to attempt those tones, i commend your effort, the first one was good the second needs a little more practice, also the california english /uw/ as in GOOSE is central and high unrounded, not back and high unrounded, so not an example of [ɯ] but of [ʉ] -in any case great video as always! keep up the good work, can't wait for next week's video!!

[@lilywater3683]

Hopefully, they'll take about Korean in the next episode.

[@emilespinosa9774]

Have just found your channel. New subscriber here. Thank you so much..more power and have a blessed day to all!

[@JSbeat]

What would you say to musicians who say music is a language? Im on the music education field, and there’s a whole wave of teachers insisting to teach music as a mother tongue. (I don’t agree with them)

[@sturestensson9187]

[y] is exactly how "y" is pronounced in Swedish as well.

[@Ahuka]

I'm mildly surprised by how compelling I am finding this series.

[@vigilantsycamore8750]

9:37 Polish also has nasalized vowels: ą and ę What's interesting is that the pronunciations of ą and ę have changed somewhat in recent decades: before a consonant they're often (not always) pronounced like on and en and if they're word-final the vowel is often denasalized. Which I *think* might be an example of a currently ongoing sound shift, like how in UK English, the "ty" sound in "tube" and "sy" sound in "tissue" turning into the palatal consonants "ć" and "ś" (that's how we'd write those sounds in Polish, English spelling is far more ambiguous) respectively

[@xihou1954]

Looking forward to the next update!!!

[@username3543]

Australian vowels are op.

[@culwin]

eeeeeeee....yeah.

[@eskualerritar]

A fascinating aspect of dialectology is that whereas English varies the vowel repertoire a lot between dialects (as Taylor mentioned), keeping consonants constant, in Spanish the opposite happens, the dialectal variation depends a lot more on consonant sounds (plus intonation etc.). Understanding different dialects of English was always complicated for me because of this reason, and I presume that the opposite works in the opposite direction.

[@enriquematias2589]

Jiu

[@pablomedina88]

"Catagorical"?

[@N1CKSO]

This episode made me sound insane

[@Edotter]

I've always wondered how you SING in a toned language... I mean obviously people do, but, how?

[@vortexofvohimeth9112]

I'm a Filipino and there's a word "Oy!" meaning "Hey!" in an angry way. I noticed it's IPA symbol is [oi].

[@tha123dyyd]

Had to go listen to the vowel song masterpiece by System of a Down: I-E-A-I-E-A-O

[@AdrianParsons]

You clearly haven't heard much by "Our Lady Peace"!

[@BozheTsaryaKhrani]

I was just doin some language stuff too

[@keerat8867]

wassasususuauaususususussusususp crash courseeee

[@dudebjj]

Where can I get a full transcript of this?

[@twothreebravo]

Oi!

[@reppepper]

Our premier of Ontario pronounces Covid as Cove-ed, but I bet he thinks he’s saying id.

[@joemama68]

Categorical is misspelled in the video

[@GIR9595]

YEEEEAAAAHHHHHH B-(5:36)

[@aaronhe6877]

pls art history

[@mystic_tacos]

Art history would be fascinating as well!!!

[@NikolajLepka]

disem-vowel-ed ha

[@GusLogsdon]

What was that French word..?

[@xoTalim]

Which one? What was the timestamp in the video where she said it?

[@christosscapularis4483]

i think it was "tu"

[@elipandaman]

meaning "you"

[@challalla]

As much as I appreciate this series, I wish they were more careful about the vowel symbols they used in this video, and that they used native speaker pronunciations for the examples. Strictly, [e] and [o] are close-mid vowels, not simply mid vowels. We often use them for mid vowels in the case of five-vowel systems like Spanish, but for languages like English we need to be careful about distinguishing them from their open-mid counterparts [ɛ] and [ɔ], especially for the latter since several English vowels are conventionally transcribed with it. This might not be a problem if they decided to stick to the simpler vowel symbols throughout, but they don't. Writing the diphthong in CHOICE as [oi] while writing the PRICE and MOUTH diphthongs as [aɪ] and [aʊ] is simply inconsistent. The CHOICE diphthong should conventionally be [ɔɪ], as it appears in the English vowel chart in the video for General American. If we were using the simpler symbols on purpose then we would also write [ai] and [au] for PRICE and MOUTH. Today's Parisian French pronunciation of the nasalized vowel in "bon" actually is close to [õ], even though the traditional symbol is [ɔ̃] (which is still appropriate for many French dialects). But given the confusion of [o] and [ɔ] elsewhere in the video, I wonder if this is intentional. Ironically, the host's pronunciation of "bon" is much closer to Parisian French than her pronunciation of "beau", which is too open and closer to *[bɔ], not the correct [bo]. Californian "dude" does not have [ɯ]; it is fronter than that, at best a slightly rounded [ɨ]. The problem is that for many English speakers including our host, the GOOSE vowel is not actually [u] all the way in the back of the mouth but something closer to [ʉ] which is more central; [ɨ] is its unrounded counterpart.

[@SotraEngine4]

I wish I could give you more likes

[@linguaphile88]

Wait, in French the nasalized "o" is pronounced [ɔ̃] not [õ].

[@israellai]

Afaik the former is en, the latter is on

[@Mienshao11]

thats en not on

[@challalla]

As I mentioned in another comment, today's Parisian French actually pronounces something closer to [õ] for the vowel in "bon". But the conventional transcription is indeed [ɔ̃]. In Parisian French, the vowel in "en", conventionally transcribed [ɑ̃], can indeed approach [ɔ̃] (although I think something like [ɒ̃] is more typical); this is due to an anticlockwise chain shift in the vowel space for nasalized vowels in that variety. The result is that "plein" as pronounced by a Parisian speaker sounds a lot like how Quebec or Meridional French speakers would say "plan".

[@greenboy1916]

I would really like to know more about conceptual phonetics since across all of the languages I have studied I have noticed how they adopt words and how they change and I’m sure there are rules behind it. Even if there aren’t rules for every language there should be rules for each language. Case in point farsi is named after the Fars province in Iran which used to be Pars until the Arabs showed up. They didn’t have a “P“ sound and so it became an “f” which comes from the same area of the mouth as you explained in previous videos. Similarly Latin and Greek words that came into Arabic that started with a “K” or a “C” depending on which language they came from are both represented with the letter "ق" in Arabic which is much deeper and in the back of the throat than either of the two sounds earlier. This could be due to the fact that in the past those Latin and Greek words were said with a Harder sound that the Arabs adapted to their own script, or it could just be that in those times it was more popular to use that sound than it is these days. Many dialects, including the Gulf dialects and Iraqi have turned that symbol into more of a “G“ sound.

[@jamessmitgaming9091]

Don't mind me , I'm just waiting for my native language to be mentioned

[@NGBigfield]

Schwa Is the German way of writing the Hebrew sound שווא Which stood as a base for the definition of the current Schwa

[@SotraEngine4]

A nitpick You noted /u/ as [u], although in square brackets, you need a horizontal line over the symbol u If I'm not mistaken, the Norwegian word o is [u] and the Norwegian sound u is that u with a line across It's correct to write it /u/ because it's kinda the way English thinks it is Also To be fair [u] is sometimes pronounced correctly. It's just really jarring when it's not

[@alans.95]

My brain is bigger

[@reppepper]

Categorical

[@Gabriel-bk3lm]

to me phonetic's HARD

[@Gabriel-bk3lm]

god it's hard..

[@ellierickenbaugh1926]

first? not early on purpose but I’ll take it I guess

[@awesomemilkshake6612]

Same

[@stecky87]

Vowel elongation is also an indicator that you're in the Great Lakes region XD

[@joana1839]

1st Can you please leave a big heart? 😂

[@rlin]

does anyone else watch crash course exclusively during meal breaks? did you end up accidentally biting the inside of your mouth a zillion times while watching these two phonetics videos too?

[@GrandNoble]

"dood" lol

[@pvtpain66k]

Walla walla bing bang.

[@elipandaman]

WOW underrated comment

[@adamharoon6021]

First

[@seilaessecanalnvaitervideo6414]

oi mean hi in portuguese

[@HaiafaRomalho-tv5lh]

Are you a werewolf

[@murderwill320]

"catagorical" 2:34, smh

[@nutshellexplains8076]

Hello fellow students who are studying for a test tomorrow 👋

[@niviamaeva]

Is this British ?

[@mkspassov]

Categorical