| IPA:Vowels | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Legend:unrounded • rounded |
Aback vowel is any in a class ofvowel sound used in spokenlanguages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the highest point of the tongue is positioned relatively back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as aconsonant. Back vowels are sometimes also calleddark vowels because they are perceived as sounding darker than thefront vowels.[1]
Near-back vowels are essentially a type of back vowels; no language is known to contrast back and near-back vowels based on backness alone.
The category "back vowel" comprises bothraised vowels andretracted vowels.
In their articulation, back vowels do not form a single category, but may be eitherraised vowels such as[u] orretracted vowels such as[ɑ].[2]
The back vowels that have dedicated symbols in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet are:
There also are back vowels that do not have dedicated symbols in the IPA:
As here, other back vowels can be transcribed with diacritics ofrelative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels, such as ⟨u̞⟩, ⟨o̝⟩ or ⟨ʊ̠⟩ for a near-close back rounded vowel.
According toPHOIBLE, the most common phonemic back vowel is /u/, occurring in approximately 88% of languages, while the most uncommon phonemic back vowel is /ɒ/, occurring in only 2% of recorded inventories.
| Vowel | % |
|---|---|
| /u/ | 88 |
| /o/ | 60 |
| /ɔ/ | 35 |
| /ʊ/ | 14 |
| /ɑ/ | 7 |
| /ɯ/ | 6 |
| /ʌ/ | 4 |
| /ɤ/ | 3 |
| /ɒ/ | 2 |
