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Legend:unrounded • rounded |
Anear-close vowel or anear-high vowel is any in a class ofvowel sound used in some spokenlanguages. The defining characteristic of a near-close vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly to aclose vowel, but slightly less constricted.
Other names for a near-close vowel arelowered close vowel andraised close-mid vowel, though the former phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as low asclose-mid (sometimes even lower); likewise, the latter phrase may also be used to describe a vowel that is as high as close.
Near-close vowels are also sometimes described aslax variants of the fully close vowels, though, depending on the language, they may not necessarily bevariants of close vowels at all.
It is rare for languages to contrast a near-close vowel with a close vowel and aclose-mid vowel based on height alone. An example of such language isDanish, which contrasts short and long versions of the close front unrounded/i/, near-close front unrounded/e̝/ and close-mid front unrounded/e/ vowels, though in order to avoid using anyrelative articulation diacritics, Danish/e̝/ and/e/ are typically transcribed with phonetically inaccurate symbols/e/ and/ɛ/, respectively.[1] This contrast is not present in Conservative Danish, which realizes the latter two vowels as, respectively, close-mid[e] andmid[e̞].[2]
It is even rarer for languages to contrast more than one close/near-close/close-mid triplet. For instance,Sotho has two such triplets: fully front/i–ɪ–e/ and fully back/u–ʊ–o/.[3] In the case of this language, the near-close vowels/ɪ,ʊ/ tend to be transcribed with the phonetically inaccurate symbols/ɨ,ʉ/, i.e. as if they were closecentral.
It may be somewhat more common for languages to containallophonic vowel triplets that are not contrastive; for instance,Russian has one such triplet:[4]
The near-close vowels that have dedicated symbols in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet are:
TheHandbook of the International Phonetic Association defines these vowels asmid-centralized (lowered andcentralized) equivalents of, respectively,[i],[y] and[u],[5] therefore, an alternative transcription of these vowels is[i̽,y̽,u̽] or the more complex[ï̞,ÿ˕,ü̞]; however, they are not centralized in all languages - some languages have a fully front variant of[ɪ] and/or a fully back variant of[ʊ];[6] the exact backness of these variants can be transcribed in the IPA with[ɪ̟,ʊ̠],[i̞,u̞] or[e̝,o̝].
There also are near-close vowels that don't have dedicated symbols in the IPA:
(IPA letters forrounded vowels are ambiguous as to whether the rounding is protrusion or compression. However, transcription of the world's languages tends to pattern as above.)
Other near-close vowels can be indicated with diacritics ofrelative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels, such as ⟨ɪ̟⟩, ⟨i̞⟩ or ⟨e̝⟩ for a near-close front unrounded vowel, or ⟨ʊ̠⟩, ⟨u̞⟩ or ⟨o̝⟩ for a near-close back rounded vowel.
