Open central unrounded vowel

The open central unrounded vowel, also called the low central unrounded vowel, is a special kind of vowel sound used in many spoken languages around the world. It is the sound made when the mouth is open and relaxed, with the tongue positioned near the middle of the mouth. This vowel does not have a specific letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but it is often written simply as ⟨a⟩.

When more precision is needed, people can add special marks to the letter ⟨a⟩, such as ⟨ä⟩, to show that the sound is centralized. Some experts who study the Chinese language, called Sinologists, sometimes use a small capital letter ⟨ᴀ⟩ to represent this sound. However, this special symbol has not been officially accepted by the International Phonetic Alphabet, despite votes on the idea in 1976, 1989, and 2012.

This vowel sound appears in many languages, giving it an important role in how we speak and understand words. Learning about different vowel sounds helps linguists and language learners appreciate the rich variety of sounds in human speech.

Features

The open central unrounded vowel is a special sound used in many languages. The tongue is positioned low in the mouth, far from the roof. It is also in the middle, halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel. Additionally, the lips are not rounded when making this sound.

Occurrence

Most languages have some form of an unrounded open vowel. Because the International Phonetic Alphabet uses the symbol ⟨a⟩ for both front and central unrounded open vowels, it can be hard to tell which one a language uses. However, sometimes there really isn’t a difference between the two sounds. (See Vowel § Acoustics.)