Close-mid front unrounded vowel
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Close-mid_front_unrounded_vowel".

e•d (enlarge)	Front	Near-front	Central	Near-back	Back
Close	i • y ɨ • ʉ ɯ • u ɪ  ʏ   ʊ e • ø ɘ • ɵ ɤ • o ə ɛ • œ ɜ • ɞ ʌ • ɔ æ ɐ a • ɶ ɑ • ɒ
Near‑close
Close‑mid
Mid
Open‑mid
Near‑open
Open

IPA – number	302
IPA – text	e
IPA – image
Entity	e
X-SAMPA	e
Kirshenbaum	e
Sound sample (help·info)

Close-mid front unrounded vowel

The close-mid front unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is e, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is e.

Features

• Its vowel height is close-mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between close vowel and a mid vowel.
• Its vowel backness is front, which means the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.
• Its vowel roundedness is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.

Occurrence

Mid front unrounded vowel

Many languages, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Greek and Turkish, have a mid front unrounded vowel that is clearly distinct to speakers from both the close-mid and open-mid vowels. A number of dialects of such as English also have such a mid-front vowel. However, since no language is known to distinguish all three, there is no separate IPA symbol for the mid vowel, and [e] is generally used. If precision is desired, the lowering diacritic can be used: [e̞].

Although many languages have only one non-close, non-open front vowel, there is no predisposition for it being mid. Igbo, for example, has a close-mid [e], whereas Bulgarian has an open-mid [ɛ] even though these languages don't contrast said vowels with another front mid vowel.

Occurrence

In the following transcriptions, the lowering diacritic has been omitted for the sake of simplicity.

References

Bibliography

• Carbonell, Joan F. & Joaquim Llisterri (1992), "Catalan", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 22 (1-2): 53-56
• Cruz-Ferreira, Madalena (1995), "European Portuguese", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 25 (2): 90-94
• Fougeron, Cecile & Caroline L Smith (1993), "Illustrations of the IPA:French", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 23 (2): 73-76
• Jones, Daniel & Ward Dennis (1969), The Phonetics of Russian, Cambridge University Press
• Martínez-Celdrán, Eugenio; Ana Ma. Fernández-Planas & Josefina Carrera-Sabaté (2003), "Castilian Spanish", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 33 (2): 255-259
• Roca, Iggy & Wyn Johnson (1999), A Course in Phonology, Blackwell Publishing
• Rogers, Derek & Luciana d'Arcangeli (2004), "Italian", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (1): 117-121
• Shosted, Ryan K. & Chikovani Vakhtang (2006), "Standard Georgian", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 36 (2): 255-264