The Vowel: More Than Ooh’s & Ah’s
Vowels are integral to speech. We are taught from the time we are little kids that “all words must have vowels” and if it isn’t “a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y” then the spelling must be reevaluated. What this leaves out about language is that “vowels” are very complicated ideas. They exist both physically in our mouth when we use them, but they also exist in our brains as what we believe they “should” sound like. When picking out an accent in another speaker, vowels are likely the first thing we turn to because every language makes use of them differently. This blog post will try to challenge some of our common notions of vowels, what they are, and how they are actually used.
It might surprise you to learn that English does not have five or six vowels. Depending on where the speaker is from in the world, most varieties of English have twelve or thirteen vowels, some of which we don’t even think of as such. You know most of these vowels by heart, but some of them, you might be surprised to realize we use in everyday speech– I know I was when I first learned this information.
For example, what is the vowel in the word, good or foot? It isn’t the same vowel as in food. In fact, it is a vowel all on its own, in General American English it is referred to by linguists as a near-high back rounded vowel, with the symbol, ʊ. This means that it is a little bit more forward and lower in the mouth than the normal “ooh” sounds that we know a long “u” to make.
If you understood the last paragraph, good for you, but just in case, we need to take about what makes vowels different from their consonant counterparts. If you think about consonants, they all involve contact between certain parts of the mouth, usually a closure or a tightening between the tongue and the sides, top, or back of the mouth. The t, s, and l sounds all require our tongues to touch a part of our mouth in order to create a sound with certain qualities.
What is different about vowels is that there is not any contact between the tongue and the rest of the mouth. Vowels are inherently open-mouthed, they involve shaping the oral cavity instead of compressing it. This makes vowels much more complex and hard to classify. Look at the IPA charts for consonants versus vowels and try to see how differently linguists categorize and think about these ideas.
The potential tongue body position resembles a trapezoid.
As you can probably tell, the vowel chart has a strange, trapezoidal shape. Why isn’t is just a mesh of boxes like the consonants are? The thing is, vowels are defined in relationship to each other. Since vowels make use of open space, they each have to take a certain amount of that space. In other words, every time we make the “ooh” vowel, our mouth isn’t exactly the same shape. Say “loose Luke.” Those vowels are a little bit different even though they are the same because they are in different phonological environments. “Loose” has an “s” after the vowel, a sound that is the front of the mouth, whereas “Luke” has a “k,” a sound which is at the back of the mouth. So, in reality, the “u” sound in “loose” is a little further forward in the mouth than the “u” sound in Luke. But, we register them as the same, the long u sound, because that is what we have been trained for.
Even though there are twenty-nine or so vowels depicted here, no language even comes close to having all of them. Languages pick and choose a select amount. English has up to sixteen, shown below, though few speakers use all of them. Some vowels are always distinct, such as i (the vowel in sheet) and u (the vowel in flute). But other vowels are so close to each other that they merge for some speakers, such as the pin-pen merger of the American South where pin and pen are pronounced exactly the same, or the cot-caught merger of the Northeast-Mid-Atlantic.
English vowels
One of the coolest features of vowel systems is that they are actually quite predictable (up to a point). This is because vowels tend to want to be far from each other in the space that they consider theirs. Say “beat” and “bit” back to back. The vowels in those words are extremely close. If you have ever met someone that natively speaks a language without the vowel in “bit,” they probably pronounce these words the same. If you look at the chart above, the lowercase-i is the vowel in beat and the uppercase-i is the vowel in bit. In languages without the bit vowel, that space is inhabited by the beat vowel. So someone who natively speaks Spanish might say, “I bit the beet” and it might sound like “I beat the beet.” We can all pick up on accents naturally, we just don’t always know why.
So, while we can’t predict that with accuracy what the seven vowels in a random given language are, we can kind of predict what the arrangement of those vowel spaces will look like. For example, we have never found a three-vowel system that uses the vowels: u, o, and ʊ, and this is because these three vowels are so close to each other. Human speech naturally tends to use as much space as it can, and so we can predict that a language will never choose these three vowels. They are simply too close to each other. To relate is back to English, we don’t just have bit and beat. We also have boot, bite, bot, bet, boat, bat, bought, bait, and but. The reason why we have the distinction between bit and beat is because we are already making use of all of these other parts of the mouth.
The number of vowels does not predict how complex or intelligent and language is. Languages are all equal in their complexity, they simply make use of different systems to varying degrees. Just as English has thirteen vowels while others have three, English has around twenty-four consonants. Other languages, such as Taa, make use of more than 100! A language’s complexity cannot be evaluated from its parts; all languages use emergent systems that separate and categorize the same processes differently. A language can infinitely build using a set amount of parts. Some languages choose to repeat those parts or expand them, while others choose to use as many different discrete parts as possible. It is part of what makes learning a new language such a daunting task. We have to relearn and train ourselves to formulate and experience the world with a different set of rules.
What begins to complicate our perception of vowels is the fact that there are some sounds which fall between our categorizations of vowel and consonant. These sounds, often called liquids, glides, or semivowels, are phonemes which don’t have full vowel qualities, but they also don’t constrict the air enough to count as consonants. An example is the English w-sound. We don’t always know what to do with sounds like these and there is still plenty of research we have to do in order to find out how they actually function in our speech.
Berber languages are spoken in North-Western and North Central Africa.
Finally, what if I told you that this notion of “every word must have a vowel” wasn’t even true? There are languages out there that don’t actually necessitate vowels. Vowels usually constitute what is called the sonority peak, which means that, basically, they are the loudest or most obvious part of the word. But, while most languages require a vowel to inhabit this sonority peak, many find it acceptable to put a nasal sound (like “n”), a glide (like “l”), or even a fricative (like “s”). Words like “tfk” are totally fine in languages like Berber.
As with most of these blog posts, we come to the conclusion that the topic of discussion is much more complicated than our brains tend to want us to realize. We have so much subconscious knowledge, and by attempting to dredge it up and expose it, we find out more about how we realistically interact with the world and how the human experience seeks to formulate itself.
