In linguistics, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Czech, Finnish, Japanese, Hawaiian, Old English, or Thai, and even in a few dialects of English, as in Australian English, New Zealand English.
Most languages either do not distinguish vowel length, or distinguish between only short vowels and long vowels. There are very few languages that distinguish three vowel lengths, for instance Estonian or Wichita.
Vowel length and stress
In languages that do not have distinctive vowel length, lexical stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length.
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 Finnish or classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive in unstressed syllables as well.
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 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 the historical pronunciation and development of those vowels and not their actual pronunciation.
Allophonic vowel length
In certain dialects of the modern English language, for instance general American, there is allophonic vowel length: vowels are long before voiced consonants in the coda of a syllable. For example, the vowel /æ/ in bat is short [bæt], because /t/ is unvoiced, while the same vowel /æ/ in bad is long [bæːd], because /d/ is voiced. (Incidentally, the consonants in these syllables also have different relative lenghths; the [t] of bat is longer than the [d] of bad.)
Phonemic vowel length
In Australian English and in New Zealand English, there is distinctive phonemic vowel length which distinguishes such minimal pairs as the following (examples from Australian English):
| lust | vs | last
|
| bid | vs | beard
|
| ferry | vs | fairy
|
Notations in the Latin alphabet
No mark at all
- In Latin, long vowels were not marked (modern Latin texts use sometimes the macron).
Diacritics
- Macron, used in Maori, Latvian and many transcription schemes (eg. Hepburn for Japanese). A vowel with a macron indicates a long vowel (kōtsū "traffic"), with macronless vowels being short (kotsu "bone").
- Breves are used to mark short vowels in several linguistic transcription systems.
- Circumflex, 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.
- Ring, used in Czech, where the character is known as a krouzek and is used for the long U sound, as in kůň "horse".
Additional letters
- Vowel doubling, used consistently in Estonian, Finnish, and occasionally in Dutch, German. 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.
- 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 occasionally used in many German words.
Other signs
- Colon, 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.
- Middle dot, 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].
Notations in other writing systems
In non-Latin writing systems, a variety of mechanisms have also evolved.
- In descendants of 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 indicated by adding vowel characters after a consonant-vowel characters.
- A long O or U is indicated by adding the hiragana character う (u), as in こうつう kōtsū "traffic" instead of こつ kotsu "bone".
- Note that the hiragana character お (o) is used instead in the comparatively rare cases where the long O is not part of a loanword from Chinese, such as おおきい ōkii "large". This difference in orthography has its roots in the historical development of the Japanese language.
- A long E or I is indicated by adding い (i), as in せんせい sensei "teacher" (pronounced [sense:]).
- Long A is rare in native Japanese words, but can be rendered in hiragana by adding the character あ (a), as in おかあさん okaasan "mother."
- In the Japanese katakana syllabary, long vowels are almost always indicated by adding the special bar character ー, as in コーツー kōtsū "traffic" instead of コツ kotsu "bone".
See also:
