In
linguistics, 'vowel length' is the perceived
duration of a
vowel sound. Often the
chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of
English, vowel length is an important
phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in
Arabic,
Czech,
Hindi,
Sanskrit,
Fijian,
Finnish,
Japanese,
Hawaiian,
Hungarian,
Classical Latin,
Lombard,
German,
Latvian,
Old English,
Samoan,
Thai, and
Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of English dialects, and is said to be phonemic in a few dialects, such as
Australian English and
New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in
Cantonese, which is exceptional among the
spoken variants of
Chinese.
Most languages do not distinguish vowel length, and for those that do, usually the only distinction is between 'short vowels' and 'long vowels'. There are very few languages that distinguish three vowel lengths, for instance
Mixe. Some languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and Japanese, also have words where long vowels are immediately followed by more vowels, e.g. Japanese ''hōō'' "phoenix" or Estonian ''jäääär'' "ice edge".
Vowel length and related features
Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is
lexical. For example,
French long vowels always occur on stressed syllables.
Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length. This gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long vowel, which is a short vowel found in a syllable immediately preceded by a stressed short vowel, e.g. ''i-s'o'''.
Among the languages that have distinctive vowel length, there are some where it may only occur in stressed syllables, e.g. in the
Alemannic German dialect. In languages such as
Czech,
Finnish or
Classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive in unstressed syllables as well. Imitating long vowels in unstressed syllables is surprisingly easy for anyone trained in singing: e.g., consider a loud but short eighth note followed by a softer quarter note.
In
Baltic-Finnic languages, such as Finnish, vowel length is sometimes better analyzed as a sequence of two identical vowels. The simplest example follows from
consonant gradation: ''haka → haan''. In some cases, it is caused by a following
chroneme, which is etymologically a consonant, e.g. ''jää'' " ←
Proto-Finno-Ugric ★ ''jäŋe''. In noninitial syllables, it is ambiguous if long vowels are vowel clusters — poems written in the
Kalevala meter often syllabicate between the vowels, and an (etymologically original) intervocalic ''-h-'' is seen in this and some modern dialects.
Phonemic vowel length
Many languages have phonemic long and short vowels:
Japanese,
Finnish,
Hungarian, etc.
Estonian has three distinctive lengths, but the third is
suprasegmental, as it has developed from the allophonic variation caused by now-deleted grammatical markers. For example, half-long 'aa' in ''saada'' comes from the agglutination
★ ''saata+ka'' "send+(imperative)", and the overlong 'aa' in ''saada'' comes from
★ ''saa+ta'' "get+(infinitive)". One of the very few languages to have three lengths, independent of vowel quality or syllable structure, is
Mixe. An example from Mixe is "guava", "spider", "knot". Similar claims have been made for
Yavapai and
Wichita.
Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in kiKamba, there is , , , "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".
Long vowels in English
Vowel length, when applied to English, has several different related meanings.
Traditional non-phonetic "long" and "short" vowels
Traditionally, the vowels (as in ''b'ai't b'ee't b'i'te b'oa't b'eau'ty'') are said to be the "long" counterparts of the vowels (as in ''b'a't b'e't b'i't b'o't p'u't'') which are said to be "short". This terminology reflects their pronunciation before the
Great Vowel Shift, rather than their present-day pronunciations. A linguistically more accurate description is that the former are
diphthongs (except for ), while the latter are
monophthongs ("pure" vowels).
Allophonic vowel length
In certain dialects of the modern English language, for instance
General American and, to some extent, British
Received Pronunciation, there is
allophonic vowel length: vowel phonemes are realized as longer vowel allophones before voiced
consonant phonemes in the coda of a
syllable. For example, the vowel phoneme in ‘bat’ is realized as a short allophone in , because the phoneme is unvoiced, while the same vowel phoneme in ‘bad’ is realized as a long allophone (which could be transcribed as ), because is voiced. (Incidentally, the final consonant allophones in these syllables also have different relative lengths; the of ''ba't''' is longer than the of ''ba'd'.'')
Symbolic representation of the two
allophonic rules:
| | → | | > _ /+con +vcd/ |
>| | → | |
>| | → | | > _ /+con -vcd/ |
>| | → | |
In addition, the vowels of Received Pronunciation are commonly divided into short and long, as obvious from their transcription. The short vowels are (as in ''kit''), (as in ''foot''), (as in ''dress''), (as in ''strut''), (as in ''trap''), (as in ''lot''), and (as in the first syllable of ''ago'' and in the second of ''sofa''). The long vowels are (as in ''fleece''), (as in ''goose''), (as in ''nurse''), as in ''north'' and ''thought'', and (as in ''father'' and ''start''). While a different degree of length is indeed present, there are also differences in the
''quality'' (
lax vs tense) of these vowels, and the currently prevalent view tends to emphasise the latter rather than the former.
Phonemic vowel length
In
Australian English, there is distinctive
phonemic vowel length. The following are minimal pairs of length for many speakers:
| ''ferry'' | vs | ''fairy'' |
| ''span'' past tense of ''spin'' | vs | as in ''wing span'' |
| ''can'' meaning ''able to'' | vs | as in ''tin can'' |
| ''hat'' | vs | ''heart'' |
| ''bid'' | vs | ''beard'' |
Etymologies
The long vowel may often be traced to
assimilation. For a clear-cut example, consider
spoken Finnish ''suurii'' < ''suuria'': the chroneme is the only marker for the
partitive case. In Australian English, the second element of a diphthong has assimilated to the preceding vowel, giving the pronunciation of ''bared'' as , creating a contrast with ''bed'' . Another etymology is the
vocalization of a fricative such as the
voiced velar fricative or
voiced palatal fricative, e.g. Finnish
illative case, or even an approximant, as the English 'r'.
Estonian, of
Balto-Finnic languages, exhibits a rare phenomenon, where allophonic length variation becomes phonemic following the deletion of the suffixes causing the allophony. Estonian already distinguishes two vowel lengths, but a third one has been introduced by this phenomenon. For example, the Balto-Finnic imperative marker
★ ''-k'' caused the preceding vowels to be articulated shorter, and following the deletion of the marker, the allophonic length became phonemic, as shown in the example below. Similarly, the Australian English phoneme was created by the incomplete application of a rule extending before certain voiced consonants, a phenomenon known as the
bad-lad split.
Notations in the Latin alphabet
Diacritics
★
Macron, (ā), used to indicate a long vowel in
Maori,
Latvian and many transcription schemes, including romanizations for
Sanskrit, the
Hepburn romanization for
Japanese, and
Yale for
Korean. While not a feature in
Latin proper, the macron is also used as a teaching aid in modern Latin textbooks.
★
★
Breves, (ă), are used to mark short vowels in several
linguistic transcription systems, as well as in
Vietnamese.
★
Acute accent, (á), used to indicate a long vowel in
Czech,
Old Norse,
Hungarian and
Slovak.
★
Circumflex, (â), used for example in
Welsh. As with acute accents, a vowel with an accent is long, with other vowels being short. The circumflex is occasionally used as a surrogate for the macrons, particularly in the
Kunrei-shiki romanization of Japanese.
★
Ogonek, (ą), used in
Lithuanian to indicate long vowels.
★
Umlaut mark, (ä), used in
Aymara to indicate long vowels.
Additional letters
★ 'Vowel doubling', used consistently in
Estonian,
Finnish,
Lombard and in closed syllables in
Dutch. Example: Finnish ''tuuli'' 'wind' vs. ''tuli'' 'fire'.
★
★ Estonian also has a rare "overlong" vowel length, but does not distinguish this from the normal long vowel in writing; see the example below.
★ 'Consonant doubling' is very common in
Swedish. The system is somewhat inconsistent, especially in loan-words, around consonant clusters and with word final nasal consonants. Examples:
'Consistent use:' ''byta'' 'to change' vs ''bytta'' 'tub' and ''koma'' 'coma' vs ''komma'' 'to come'
'Inconsistent use:' ''fält'' 'a field' and ''kam'' 'a comb' (but the verb 'to comb' is ''kamma'')
★
Classical Milanese orthography uses consonant doubling in closed short syllables. Eg. ''lenguagg'' 'language' and ''pubblegh'' 'public'.
[1]
★ ''ie'' is used to mark the long sound in
Dutch and in
German. In German, this is due to the preservation and generalization of a historical ''ie'' spelling that originally represented the sound . In northern German, a following ''e'' letter lengthens other vowels as well, e.g. in the name
Kues .
★ A following ''h'' is frequently used in
German and older
Swedish spelling, e.g. German ''Zahn'' [tsaːn] 'tooth'.
★ In
Czech, the additional letter 'ů' is used for the long U sound, where the character is known as a
kroužek, e.g. ''kůň'' "horse". (This actually developed from the
ligature "uo", which signified the
diphthong /uo/, which later shifted to /uː/.)
Other signs
★
Colon (punctuation), commonly used in
IPA phonetic transcription but no native writing systems. Vowel length can also be signified by a half-colon (a colon with only the top dot), meaning half-long, and a double colon, meaning twice as long as a regular vowel. This "colon" is actually two triangles facing each other in an
hourglass shape instead of the usual two dots. A
breve is used to mark a short vowel.
::Estonian has a three-way phonemic contrast:
:::''saada'' "to get"
:::''saada'' "send!"
:::''sada'' "hundred"
::Although not phonemic, the distinction can also be illustrated in certain dialects of English:
:::''bead''
:::''beat''
:::''bit''
★
Interpunct, commonly used in non-IPA phonetic transcription, such as the
Americanist system developed by linguists for transcribing the indigenous languages of the Americas. Example: Americanist = IPA .
★ Some languages make no distinction in writing. This is particularly the case with ancient languages such as
Latin and
Old English. Modern edited texts often use macrons with long vowels, however.
Australian English does not distinguish the vowels from in spelling, with words like ‘span’ or ‘can’ having different pronunciations depending on meaning.
Notations in other writing systems
In non-Latin writing systems, a variety of mechanisms have also evolved.
★ In abjads derived from the
Aramaic alphabet, notably
Arabic and
Hebrew, long vowels are written with consonant letters (mostly
approximant consonant letters), while short vowels are typically omitted entirely. Most of these scripts also have optional diacritics that can be used to mark short vowels when needed.
★ In
South-Asian abugidas, such as
Devanagari or the
Thai alphabet, there are different vowel signs for short and long vowels.
★ In the Japanese
hiragana syllabary, long vowels are usually indicated by adding a vowel character after. For vowels , , and , the corresponding independent vowel is added. Thus: あ (a), おかあさん, "okaasan", mother; い (i), にいがた "Niigata", city in northern Japan (usu. 新潟, in
kanji); う (u), りゅう (usu. 竜), dragon. The mid-vowels and may be written with え (e) (rare) (ねえさん (姉さん), neesan, "elder sister") and お (o) [おおきい (usu 大きい), ookii, big] , or with い (i) (めいれい (命令), "meirei", command/order) and う (u) (おうさま (王様), ousama, "king") depending on etymological, morphological, and historic grounds.
★
★ Most long vowels in the
katakana syllabary are written with a special bar symbol ー (vertical in
vertical writing), called a
chōon, as in メーカー ''mēkā'' "maker" instead of メカ ''meka'' "
mecha". However, some long vowels are written with additional vowel characters, as with hiragana, with the distinction being orthographically significant.
★ In the
Korean Hangul alphabet, vowel length is not distinguished in normal writing. Some dictionaries use the <> symbol, for example
무ː “
Daikon radish”.
See also
★
length (phonetics)
★
gemination
★
list of phonetic topics
★
Scots vowel length rule
References
★
Some Features of the Vernacular Finnish of Jyväskylä
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