A near-close vowel or a near-high vowel is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a near-close vowel is that the tongue is positioned similarly to a close vowel, but slightly less constricted. Near-close vowels are sometimes described as lax variants of the fully close vowels.
![](https://web.archive.org/web/20160418053639im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/Danish_monophthongs_chart.svg/250px-Danish_monophthongs_chart.svg.png)
It is rare for languages to contrast a near-close vowel with a close vowel and a close-mid vowel based on height alone. An example of such language is Danish, which contrasts short and long versions of the close front unrounded /i/, near-close front unrounded /e̝/ and close-mid front unrounded /e/ vowels, though in order to avoid using any relative articulation diacritics, Danish /e̝/ and /e/ are typically transcribed with phonetically inacurrate symbols /e/ and /ɛ/, respectively.[1][2] This contrast is not present in Conservative Danish, which realizes the latter two vowels as, respectively, close-mid [e] and mid [e̞].[3]
No language contrasts non-front close, near-close and close-mid vowels based on height alone, though all three of them may appear allophonically; for instance, Russian has three central rounded vowels:[4]
- close [ʉ], an allophone of /u/ between soft consonants in stressed syllables;
- near-close [ʉ̞], an allophone of /u/ between soft consonants in unstressed syllables;
- close-mid [ɵ], an allophone of /o/ after soft consonants.
Partial list
The near-close vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
- near-close near-front unrounded vowel [ɪ]
- near-close near-front compressed vowel [ʏ]
- near-close near-back rounded vowel [ʊ]
The Handbook of the International Phonetic Association defines these vowels as mid-centralized (lowered and centralized) equivalents of, respectively, [i], [y] and [u],[5] therefore, an alternative transcription of these vowels is [i̽, y̽, u̽] or the more complex [ï̞, ÿ˕, ü̞].
There also are near-close vowels that don't have dedicated symbols in the IPA:
- near-close near-front protruded vowel [ʏʷ] (ʏ̫)
- near-close central unrounded vowel [ɪ̈] (ᵻ)
- near-close central compressed vowel [ʏ̈]
- near-close central protruded vowel [ʊ̈] (ᵿ)
- near-close near-back unrounded vowel [ɯ̽] or [ɯ̞̈]
- near-close near-back compressed vowel [ʊᵝ]
(IPA letters for rounded vowels are ambiguous as to whether the rounding is protrusion or compression. However, transcription of the world's languages tends to pattern as above.)
Other near-close vowels can be indicated with diacritics of relative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels, such as ⟨i̞⟩, ⟨e̝⟩ or ⟨ɪ̟⟩ for a near-close front unrounded vowel, or ⟨u̞⟩, ⟨o̝⟩ or ⟨ʊ̠⟩ for a near-close back rounded vowel.
References
- ^ Grønnum (1998), p. 100.
- ^ Basbøll (2005), pp. 45, 48, 50–52.
- ^ Ladefoged & Johnson (2010), p. 227.
- ^ Jones & Ward (1969), pp. 62, 67-68.
- ^ International Phonetic Association (1999), p. 13.
Bibliography
- Basbøll, Hans (2005), The Phonology of Danish, ISBN 0-203-97876-5
- Grønnum, Nina (1998), "Illustrations of the IPA: Danish", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 28 (1 & 2): 99–105, doi:10.1017/s0025100300006290
- International Phonetic Association (1999), Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-65236-7
- Jones, Daniel; Ward, Dennis (1969), The Phonetics of Russian, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-06736-7
- Ladefoged, Peter; Johnson, Keith (2010), A Course in Phonetics (6th ed.), Boston, Massachusetts: Wadsworth Publishing, ISBN 978-1-4282-3126-9