Front rounded vowel

IPA vowel chart
Front Near-​front Central Near-​back Back Close i • y ɨ • ʉ ɯ • u ɪ • ʏ ɪ̈ • ʊ̈ ɯ̽ • ʊ e • ø ɘ • ɵ ɤ • o e̞ • ø̞ ə • ɵ̞ ɤ̞ • o̞ ɛ • œ ɜ • ɞ ʌ • ɔ æ •  ɐ • ɞ̞ a • ɶ ä • ɒ̈ ɑ • ɒ Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open
Paired vowels are: unrounded • rounded
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A front rounded vowel is a particular type of vowel that is both front and 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 near-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 Chinese.

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:

• Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g. Standard Chinese, Standard Tibetan)
• Various Indo-European languages:
  • most Germanic languages
  • Gallo-Romance languages, a subset of the Romance languages (e.g. French, Occitan, Lombard)
  • Albanian
  • Ancient Greek
• Turkic languages (e.g. Turkish, Azerbaijani)
• Mongolic languages
• Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian)