Close-mid central rounded vowel

The close-mid central rounded vowel, or high-mid central rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɵ⟩, a lowercase barred letter o, and should not be confused with the Greek letter theta, ⟨θ⟩, which in IPA corresponds to a consonant sound, the voiceless dental fricative.

The IPA prefers terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. However, a large number of linguists, perhaps a majority, prefer the terms "high" and "low", and these are the only terms found in introductory textbooks on phonetics such as those by Peter Ladefoged.

The symbol for the close-mid central rounded vowel may also be used with a lowering diacritic, [ɵ̞], to denote the mid central rounded vowel.

The character ɵ has been used in several Latin-derived alphabets such as the one for Janalif, but in that language it denotes a different sound than it does in the IPA. The character is homographic with Cyrillic Ө. The Unicode code point is U+019F Ɵ latin capital letter o with middle tilde (HTML: Ɵ ).

Features

• Its vowel height is close-mid, also known as high-mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between a close vowel (a high vowel) and a mid vowel.
• Its vowel backness is central, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel.
• Its vowel roundedness is rounded, which means that the lips are rounded rather than relaxed or spread.

Occurrence

The Swedish [ɵ] is pronounced with compressed lips, more closely transcribed [ɵᵝ] or [ɘᵝ]. That of reduced English /oʊ/ is pronounced with protruded lips, more closely transcribed [ɵʷ] or [əʷ], though these could be misread as diphthongs. The type of rounding of [ɵ] in the other languages is not clear.

References

Bibliography

• Cox, F.M. (2006), "The acoustic characteristics of /hVd/ vowels in the speech of some Australian teenagers", Australian Journal of Linguistics 26: 147–179, http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=g757708700~db=all 
• Durie, M.; Hajek, J. (1994), "A revised standard phonemic orthography for Australian English vowels", Australian Journal of Linguistics 14 (1): 93–107, doi:10.1080/07268609408599503 
• Iivonen, Antti; Harnud, Huhe (2005), "Acoustical comparison of the monophthong systems in Finnish, Mongolian and Udmurt", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 35 (1): 59–71, doi:10.1017/S002510030500191X