Vowel length
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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 Czech, Hindi, Sanskrit, Fijian, Finnish, Japanese, Hawaiian, Classical Latin, 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.
English does indeed rely on vowel length. Listening to German speakers speak English makes this very apparent. They say "pot" and "pod" with the same vowel length (also "kit / kid", "lab / lap"). A native English speaker uses a long vowel with words ending in a soft consonant. (For example, pick/pig, cease / seize etc.)
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".
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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-so.
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 metre 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 [poʃ] "guava", [poˑʃ] "spider", [poːʃ] "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 [ko.ko.na], [kóó.ma̋], [ko.óma̋], [nétónubáné.éetɛ̂] "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 /ei iː ai oʊ juː/ (as in bait beet bite boat beauty) are said to be the "long" counterparts of the vowels /æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʊ/ (as in bat bet bit bot put) which are said to be "short". This terminology reflects their pronunciation before the Great Vowel Shift, rather than their present-day pronunciations.
Allophonic vowel length
In certain dialects of the modern English language, for instance General American, there is allophonic vowel length: vowel phonemes are realized as long vowel allophones before voiced consonant phonemes in the coda of a syllable. For example, the vowel phoneme /æ/ in /ˈbæt/ ‘bat’ is realized as a short allophone [æ] in [ˈbæt], because the /t/ phoneme is unvoiced, while the same vowel /æ/ phoneme in /ˈbæd/ ‘bad’ is realized as a long allophone in [ˈbæːd], because /d/ is voiced. (Incidentally, the final consonant allophones in these syllables also have different relative lengths; the [t] of bat is longer than the [d] of bad.)
Symbolic representation of the two allophonic rules:
| /æ/ | → | [æː] | | _ /+con +vcd/ |
| /ˈbæd/ | → | [ˈbæːd] | |
| /æ/ | → | [æ] | | _ /+con -vcd/ |
| /ˈbæt/ | → | [ˈbæt] |
Phonemic vowel length
In Australian English, there is distinctive phonemic vowel length. The following are minimal pairs of length for many speakers:
| [feɹi] ferry | vs | [feːɹi] fairy |
| [spæn] span past tense of spin | vs | [spæːn] as in wing span |
| [kæn] can meaning able to | vs | [kæːn] as in tin can |
| [hat] hut | vs | [haːt] heart |
| [bɪd] bid | vs | [bɪːd] 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 [ə] of a diphthong [eə] has assimilated to the preceding vowel, giving the pronunciation of bared as [beːd], creating a contrast with bed [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 /æː/ was created by the incomplete application of a rule extending /æ/ 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 unsystematically in Turkish for both vowel length and palatalization. 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.
Additional letters
- Vowel doubling, used consistently in Estonian, Finnish, and in closed syllables in Dutch. Example: Finnish tuuli /ˈtuːli/ 'wind' vs. tuli /ˈtuli/ '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.
- ie is used to mark the long /iː/ 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 /iə̯/. In northern German, a following e letter lengthens other vowels as well, e.g. in the name Kues /kuːs/.
- A following h is frequently used in German and older Swedish words, 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 /u:/.)
- In Australian English, long vowels are variously denoted, but often as far as a generalisation can be made, a following r is often involved, e.g. /kad/ is cud, /kaːd/ is card; /hed/ is head, /heːd/ is haired. This is due to the ultimate derivation of many of Australian English's long vowels from sequences of vowel and a rhotic.
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 [saːda] "to get"
- saada [saˑda] "send!"
- sada [sada] "hundred"
- Estonian has a three-way phonemic contrast:
-
- Although not phonemic, the distinction can also be illustrated in certain dialects of English:
- bead [biːd]
- beat [biˑt]
- bit [bɪt]
- Although not phonemic, the distinction can also be illustrated in certain dialects of English:
- 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 [tʰo·] = IPA [tʰoː].
- 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 /æ/ from /æː/ 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 /aː/, /iː/, and /uː/, the corrosponding 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 /eː/ and /oː/ 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 <ː> symbol, for example 무ː “Daikon radish”.
