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In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "uttering voice" or "speaking". Vowels usually form the peak or nucleus of a syllable, whereas consonants form the onset and coda. Some languages allow sounds that wouldn't normally be classified as vowels to form the nucleus of a syllable, such as the sound of m in the English word prism, or the sound of r in the Czech word vrba (meaning "willow"). Sometimes vowels are defined by the criterion of whether they form the nucleus of a syllable, and by that criterion these sounds are vowels, but usually the sounds that can form the nucleus of a syllable are called sonorants.
The features that distinguish different vowels in a language, such as tongue position and lip roundedness, are said to determine the vowel's quality. See the table of vowels. A vowel sound whose quality doesn't change over the duration of the production of the vowel is called a monophthong. Monophthongs are sometimes called "pure" or "stable" vowels. A vowel sound that glides from one quality to another is called a diphthong, and a vowel sound that glides between three qualities is a triphthong. All languages have monophthongs and many languages have diphthongs, but triphthongs or vowel sounds with even more target qualities are relatively rare cross-linguistically. English has all three types: the vowel sound in hit is a monophthong, the vowel sound in boy is a diphthong, and the vowel sound in fire is a triphthong. In phonology, diphthongs and triphthongs are distinguished from sequences of monophthongs by whether or not the vowel sound constitutes one or more syllables. For example, the vowel sounds in the two-syllable word flower phonetically form a triphthong, but are phonologically a sequence of a diphthong (represented by the letters "ow") and a monophthong (represented by the letters "er").
Languages can distinguish different vowel qualities in a variety of ways:
Daniel Jones developed the cardinal vowel system to describe vowels.
The name "vowel" is often used for the symbols used for representing vowel sounds in a language's writing system, particularly if the language uses an alphabet. In the Latin alphabet, the vowel letters are usually A, E, I, O, U, and in some languages Y, as in English and W, as in Welsh.
There is necessarily not a direct one-to-one correspondence between the vowel sounds of a language and the vowel letters. Many languages that use a form of the Latin alphabet have more vowel sounds than can be represented by the standard set of five vowel letters. In the case of English, the five primary vowel letters can represent both long and short vowel sounds (some of the long vowel sounds in English are actually diphthongs). Furthermore, in English some vowel sounds are represented by combinations of vowel letters, such as the ea in beat or by a vowel and a glide (Y or W), as the ow in how and the oy in boy.
Other languages also attempt to overcome the limitation in the number of Latin vowel letters in similar ways. Many languages, like English, make extensive use of combinations of vowel letters to represent various sounds. However, it is also very common for languages to add diacritical marks to vowels, such as accents or umlauts, to represent the variety of possible vowel sounds. Some languages have also constructed additional vowels that are based on the standard Latin vowels, such as æ or ø that are found in some of the Scandinavian languages. The International Phonetic Alphabet has a set of 28 symbols to represent the range of basic vowel qualities, and a further set of diacritics to denote variations from the basic vowel.
The semantic significance of vowels varies widely depending on the language. In some languages, particularly Semitic languages, vowels mostly serve to denote inflections, and omitting them doesn't impede understanding. As a result, the alphabets used to write these languages, such as the Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet, do not ordinarily mark vowels. These alphabets are called abjads.
In most languages, however, vowels are very important. Although in some simple cases English can be understood without written vowels (cn y rd ths?), for long passages, including the vowels is essential for understanding. In some languages with few consonants, the vowels are also more important to the structure of the word. Pacific languages such as Maori and Fijian are of this sort. In languages that have a large vowel inventory, like Sedang, a relative of Vietnamese, which contrasts 55 different vowel qualities, vowels are critically important to understanding.
Most languages have 3–7 vowels, the following 5-vowel system being the most common:
| i | u |
| e | o |
| a | |
The reason for this seems to be that it makes the most efficient use of the vowel space. Spanish and Modern Greek, for example, have this vowel system; Latin had a similar system (it made a difference of long and short vowels in speech, but not in writing); it is for this reason that the Latin alphabet has five vowel letters. All languages have at least two vowels; the Tshwizhyi and Abzhui dialects of Abkhaz contrasts only /a/ and /i/, with significant allophony. (Some linguists claim that it is possible to posit only one vowel in some Abkhaz dialects, though the general consensus seems to be that that is stretching things a bit.) Three-vowel systems have been noted in a number of forms. These include:
A few languages, such as Navajo, have four-vowel systems that lack either i or u, but there is no known natural language that lacks some form of a. At the other end of the spectrum, languages with more than twelve vowels are relatively uncommon, although some widely-spoken languages have large vowel inventories, particularly Germanic languages. For example, English has 14–16 vowels (including diphthongs), depending on dialect, and Swedish has the most distinct vowel qualities in the height-backness-roundedness spectrum, with 17 different monophthongs. Sedang contrasts 55 different vowels.
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