Front rounded vowel

A front rounded vowel is a particular type of vowel that is both front and rounded.

IPA: Vowels
Front Central Back Close i y ɨ ʉ ɯ u Near-close ɪ ʏ ʊ Close-mid e ø ɘ ɵ ɤ o Mid e̞ ø̞ ə ɤ̞ o̞ Open-mid ɛ œ ɜ ɞ ʌ ɔ Near-open æ ɐ Open a ɶ ä ɑ ɒ
IPA help  audio full chart template Vowels beside dots are: unrounded • rounded

The front rounded vowels defined by the IPA include:

• [y], a close front rounded vowel (or "high front rounded vowel")
• [ʏ], a near-close front rounded vowel (or "near-high ...")
• [ø], a close-mid front rounded vowel (or "high-mid ...")
• [ø̞], a mid front rounded vowel
• [œ], an open-mid front rounded vowel (or "low-mid ...")
• [ɶ], an open front rounded vowel (or "low ...")

Front rounded vowels are cross-linguistically relatively uncommon, but occur in a number of well-known languages, including French, German, Turkish and Mandarin.

The high vowel [y] is the most common, while the low vowel [ɶ] is extremely rare. This is consistent with the general correlation between rounding and vowel height.

Language families in which front-rounded vowels are common are:

• Some Sino-Tibetan languages:
  • Chinese varieties (e.g. Mandarin including Standard Chinese; Cantonese; Shanghainese)
  • Standard Tibetan
• Various Indo-European languages:
  • Modern Germanic languages (with the notable exceptions of the largest dialects of Modern English (although [yː] for /uː/ is found in some accents in Northern England, and [øː] is a common South African realization of /ɜː/), and some Alemannic German dialects)
  • Gallo-Romance languages (except Catalan), a subset of the Romance languages (e.g. French, Occitan, Lombard)
  • Albanian
  • Ancient Greek
• Turkic languages (e.g. Turkish, Azerbaijani)
• Mongolic languages (e.g. Kalmyk, Inner Mongolian dialects; but not standard Khalkha)
• Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian)