A near-front vowel (also called a front-central vowel or a centralized front vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as in a front vowel, but slightly further back in the mouth. In practice, what are analyzed phonemically as rounded front vowels are typically near-front in their actual articulation.
Partial list
The near-front vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
There also are near-front vowels that don't have dedicated symbols in the IPA:
Other near-front vowels can be indicated with diacritics of relative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels, such as ⟨i̠⟩, ⟨ɪ̝⟩ or ⟨ɨ̟⟩ for a close near-front unrounded vowel.
This article was sourced from Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. World Heritage Encyclopedia content is assembled from numerous content providers, Open Access Publishing, and in compliance with The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR), Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., Public Library of Science, The Encyclopedia of Life, Open Book Publishers (OBP), PubMed, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and USA.gov, which sources content from all federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial government publication portals (.gov, .mil, .edu). Funding for USA.gov and content contributors is made possible from the U.S. Congress, E-Government Act of 2002.
Crowd sourced content that is contributed to World Heritage Encyclopedia is peer reviewed and edited by our editorial staff to ensure quality scholarly research articles.
By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. World Heritage Encyclopedia™ is a registered trademark of the World Public Library Association, a non-profit organization.