Vowels and the IPA

How do we define vowel sounds? What are all the different vowels we can make? In this week's episode, we return to the International Phonetic Alphabet to look at vowels: what parameters we use to define them, what variation we see across languages, and some ways we can play with them to create more categories of sound.
This is Topic #27!
This week's tag language: Finnish!
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The statistics cited for the different languages are based on information from UPSID, which you can find for free here: www.linguistics.ucla.edu/facil...
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Looking forward to next week!

[@saristaa1]

Would you make a video pronouncing all the vowels on the chart?

[@muddro420]

did this ever happen? that's what im looking for here

[@schelles_xviii]

@@muddro420 Hey! If you just need a quick reference to how different phonemes sound like, you can take a look at www.ipachart.com . If you click on the phonemes there'll be an audio playback for you! :)

[@serendipitousoup]

As a Linguistics Undergraduate, I appreciate these videos. I know some topics more in depth than the video can cover, but it's also nice to have reviews!

[@rakshumi]

"the siren call of vowels" was actually pretty funny

[@thelingspace]

Luisa Marsiglio Thanks! ^_^

[@akhimalexis3484]

this should be a television show, lol, so good. Just saying!...(love the ending music)

[@MisterSketch4]

Akhim Alexis yes!!!!!!!!!

[@grimth]

Thank you very much! This is so useful. I have been looking for this for a long time, now i've found it. You're cool man!

[@thelingspace]

+Alonso Martinez Thanks! Glad you got something out of it. ^_^

[@oreo131313]

Thanks for the helpful video! Could you make a video with ideas on how to practice the various sounds and learn to really capture the subtle differences?

[@darylg3560]

Just went on your website to see if I could download your Vowel Chart. I got this: Extra Materials: We'll have extra materials comparing diphthongs to vowels in hiatus (or two vowels next to each other) up later this evening! If you're seeing this, thanks for getting it so early, and we'll fix this soon. :( But thanks for the really helpful lesson. I'm just struggling to tell where my tongue is when I make sounds!

[@Poppop-xl1jl]

thanks, I always struggle with vowels in IPA transcription... they're so slippery and hard to distinguish compared to consonants.

[@thelingspace]

Pop2323pop Yeah, they do take a greater degree of practice, it's true. Because the space is more constrained, and because the space assigned to a given vowel phoneme category from language to language differs, it is harder. But it's just a matter of more training, I think. Best of luck! ^_^

[@robertandersson1128]

Thank you very much for making this video! It was really interesting to listening to you pronouncing all those vowels. How come English has so few Near-Front Central vowels?

[@christopherellis2663]

Sweet (also a pun ) Unrounded u is also found in Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, NZ English |six| London English |book| Welsh, y, not final; Românian, and on the Turkic tongue.

[@alexandrafoley4470]

I was using this vid to get my head around the unrounded u in Korean, think I finally got it

[@AYRYZIGER]

Thank you for this video. Would you consider Laver's Phonetic Architecture and his Aspects of Articulation to be an enhancement of the IPA model? Why?

[@obadiyah364]

Good info, said in a way different from most vowel videos. Very helpful that you emphasized the tongue as determining hight/openness (mouth openness is vague, is it the lower jaw or the tongue?)

[@SolarLingua]

3:37 That was more like a [ʃʉu̯:t] or [ʃʊu̯:t]. It is actually really fascinating to me that most English natives still tend to make the [u] a diphthong. A pure [ʃu:t] would be something a German native might say, if he had a strong accent. But including that would blow the video way out of proportion, I guess... :D

[@christophercook4451]

ty so much! curious what the 11 vowels you use in english are.

[@sadafkhan1679]

Super informative n helpful ......love ur videos...

[@katharinablasenbauer3609]

That's really interesting 😊 thanks for your help

[@a10485]

You can't fool me, hiding House of Leaves and Only Revolutions in the corner of the shelf.

[@thelingspace]

We weren't hiding anything! If we were, we'd have left the books at the end of a five and a half minute hallway instead.

[@taniagogoi3075]

Excellent💯

[@cindymcdonald9962]

Very great!

[@aseelm9554]

Thank you🙏🏼

[@Eurovulcan]

You're the best.

[@captainh7597]

Thanks so much. It is so clear.

[@thelingspace]

+Captain Han Glad to be able to help!

[@jimnewton4534]

Hi Moti, something that I thought about watching your videos about vowels is the way people sing. Normally one thinks of singing with pure (itialian) vowels. However, there's a huge counterexample: Country Music. I'm not a particularly big fan of CM but this video of Scotty McCreery shows one of the most extreme use of diphthongs of any song I've ever heard. In McCreery's accent, every vowel is a diphthong, even in song. This has to be a very pleasant area of language research: study of how accent and dialect effect music. Sometimes accent vanishes in song. Celine Dion has a strong Quebec accent in spoken french, but it vanishes when she sings. Not the case at all with Scotty McCreery. kzbin.info/www/bejne/gWqrnWCwoJiNqtk

[@colleenfrancis8986]

What a great video! Thank you. But do you have to speak so fast?

[@gabor6259]

The pun at the end was aStOUNDing.

[@lingfocus2133]

Thanks you

[@Harpiano]

I like your t-shirts

[@maaikekellenberger4647]

I love this. And people hate me because I keep laughing out loud in the library. Well sorry I've found heaven and you heaven't. mehe.

[@thelingspace]

+Maaike Kellenberger Haha, thanks. Glad you liked it! ^_^

[@chillwithdisha7866]

can u do a video on spectograms

[@thelingspace]

+disha nandu We've definitely thought about it! It's kind of a challenging one graphically, but we'll figure out some way to do it. We have ones for vowels and different kinds of consonants on our list for a while, and we'll try to work out a way to do it sooner rather than later. ^_^

[@Hwyadylaw]

Why use consonant symbols for diphtongs?

[@dz4k.com.]

Ubykh had 84 consonants and 2 vowels, but its last speaker died.

[@thelingspace]

Yeah... Ubykh is a really interesting case. There was a ton of allophony, but only two underlying vowel phonemes. It shows how much you can do when you're playing with a lot of consonants!

[@Wherrimy]

Yeah, no wonder he did, with just two vowels!

[@Yotanido]

Hmm diphthongs... Like the 'a' in "cape" and the 'o' in "cope", right? :D

[@thelingspace]

+Yndostrui Yeah, for North American English, those usually get realized as [ej] and [ow], which are both diphthongs. They do in my speech, for sure! But we figured we'd stick with ones that are more noticeably changing over the course of the sounds, and that are diphthongs in any dialect of English you'd want to look at. ^_^

[@yeetyeet-jb6nc]

triphthongs Mabye even and more /a̯i̯oɯ̯w/

[@mustafaatmaca5869]

You would be a good rapper . :)

[@aimulnwza]

I always have problems pronouncing central vowels. I don't know whether it's correct or not.

[@whade62000]

I feel like this "5 vowels" argument falls apart though because English does NOT have 5 vowels. It has 5 vowel LETTERS but a lot more vowel PHONEMES, similar to other European languages. English is non phonetic so those letters often do double duty.

[@cerberaodollam]

So THAT's what U being "high" means!!! It confused me because for me, "high" and "deep" vowels refer to pitch. And U counts as low, lol. (The whole "autó/teniszütő" thing.)

[@DiogoGomes17]

UK OR USA

[@babaspector]

3:35 is he going to say it??? no :'( cool video

[@terinchristydavid893]

θaŋk juː

[@thelingspace]

no: pɹɑbləm

[@yurismir1]

Are you Canadian?

[@thelingspace]

Yuri Ivanov I grew up in the US, but I've been living in Canada for a long time now, and I think it shows up in how I talk. But Americans tend to think I'm Canadian, and Canadians tend to think I'm American. It's a bit hard to navigate!

[@yurismir1]

The Ling Space I'm an American who thought you were Canadian :) Nice video btw

[@thelingspace]

Yuri Ivanov Thanks! Yeah, I used to be surprised about the accent thing, but I've gotten used to it now. ^_^

[@Idellle]

I can't tell Canadian and US English apart. Well southern accent I know.

[@mollof7893]

Then there is Danish which has most of them

[@livedandletdie]

Or you just start speaking Swedish. Can't really help that we use so many different vowels and diphthongs. I mean some dialects of the Scandinavian Danish/Swedish language barrier uses triphthongs even. Then and again, there doesn't exist a non-Swedish person, that can speak Swedish without you being able to hear that they can't say the words correctly. Sju and the stupid but rarely used suffix skt is so hard that unless you grew up learning it in school and tried to speak it regularly you can't pick it up precisely. Oh and an example of a triphthong in the Österlen dialect, Breöud which is crazily similar sounding to the word for babe in Swedish, brud, that would be the same u sound as the japanese guys, no wonder there are so many people in Sweden nowadays trying to learn japanese we have the same vowels and a few more.. it's fun though that Swedes depending on were they live either have the 8 standard swedish vowels or 16 vowels. And goes from 0 Diphthongs to a lot of diphthongs and into some parts with triphthongs. I blame it on that Southern Swedes are smarter than Northern Swedes so that we can actually differentiate a lot more sounds than the northerners, and maybe because we speak to the Danes, polish and Germans a lot, plus that we used to have our own language back in the days. TL:DR Wall of text was a bother, I don't care read it...

[@johannesm536]

Nice video, but there are too many jump cuts

[@tricky_english]

a ~ aː ɪ ~ ɪː ɛ ~ ɛː ɔ ~ ɔː ə ~ əː i u ɛi ai ɔi au əu ☝️ British, Australian æ ɛ ɪ ɑ ə i u o ɚ ɛi ɑi oi æu iɚ ɛɚ ɑɚ oɚ ☝️ American There are only 17 vowels, not 20

[@terinchristydavid893]

Sorry there are 31

[@jalalarmion3096]

Maybe if you speak a little slowly, we all understand what you are trying to say.

[@jayantajithazarika2619]

Deliver your lecture much more slowly. While delivering lecture on a subject which many people around the world definitely find difficult for those weird IPA symbols you are delivering lecture faster than a bullet train. We do not like this kind of training.

[@aseelm9554]

Thank you🙏🏼

[@thelingspace]

+A madani You're welcome! ^_^