| Above: | Long |
| Ipa Symbol: | ◌ː |
| Ipa Number: | 503 |
| Decimal1: | 720 |
| Above: | Half-long |
| Ipa Symbol: | ◌ˑ |
| Ipa Number: | 504 |
| Decimal1: | 721 |
| Above: | Extra-short |
| Ipa Symbol: | ◌̆ |
| Ipa Number: | 505 |
| Decimal1: | 774 |
| Unicode: | U+0306 |
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, for example in Arabic, Dravidian languages (such as Tamil), some Finno-Ugric languages (such as Finnish), Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan, and Xhosa. Some languages in the past likely had the distinction even though their descendants do not, with an example being Latin and its descendent Romance languages.
While vowel length alone does not change word meaning in most dialects of modern English, it is said to do so in a few non-rhotic dialects, such as Australian English, Lunenburg English, New Zealand English, and South African English, and in a few rhotic dialects, such as Scottish English and Northern Irish English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike in other varieties of Chinese, which do not have phonemic vowel length distinctions.
Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically, meaning that vowel length does not change meaning. However, the amount of time a vowel is uttered can change based on factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it, for instance whether the vowel is followed by a voiced or a voiceless consonant.
Languages that do distinguish vowel length phonemically usually only distinguish between short vowels and long vowels. Very few languages distinguish three phonemic vowel lengths; some that do so are Estonian, Luiseño, and Mixe. However, languages with two vowel lengths may permit words in which two adjacent vowels are of the same quality: Japanese Japanese: [[hōō]], "phoenix", or Ancient Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: ἀάατος pronounced as /[a.áː.a.tos]/,[1] "inviolable". Some languages that do not ordinarily have phonemic vowel length but permit vowel hiatus may similarly exhibit sequences of identical vowel phonemes that yield phonetically long vowels, such as Georgian Georgian: გააადვილებ pronounced as /[ɡa.a.ad.vil.eb]/, "you will facilitate it".
Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels are always in stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length, which 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: i-so.
Among the languages with distinctive vowel length, there are some in which it may occur only in stressed syllables, such as in Alemannic German, Scottish Gaelic and Egyptian Arabic. In languages such as Czech, Finnish, some Irish dialects and Classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive also in unstressed syllables.
In some languages, vowel length is sometimes better analyzed as a sequence of two identical vowels. In Finnic languages, such as Finnish, the simplest example follows from consonant gradation: haka → haan. In some cases, it is caused by a following chroneme, which is etymologically a consonant: jää "ice" ← Proto-Uralic *jäŋe. In non-initial 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 that and some modern dialects (taivaan vs. taivahan "of the sky"). Morphological treatment of diphthongs is essentially similar to long vowels. Some old Finnish long vowels have developed into diphthongs, but successive layers of borrowing have introduced the same long vowels again so the diphthong and the long vowel now again contrast (nuotti "musical note" vs. nootti "diplomatic note").
In Japanese, most long vowels are the results of the phonetic change of diphthongs; au and ou became ō, iu became yū, eu became yō, and now ei is becoming ē. The change also occurred after the loss of intervocalic phoneme pronounced as //h//. For example, modern Kyōto (Kyoto) has undergone a shift: pronounced as //kjauto/ → /kjoːto//. Another example is shōnen (boy): pronounced as //seuneɴ/ → /sjoːneɴ/ [ɕoːneɴ]/.
As noted above, only a relatively few of the world's languages make a phonemic distinction between long and short vowels. Some families have many such languages, examples being the Dravidian languages and the Finno-Ugric languages. Other languages have fewer relatives with vowel length, including Arabic, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic. There are also older languages such as Sanskrit, Biblical Hebrew, and Latin which have phonemic vowel length but no descendants that preserve it.
In Latin and Hungarian, some long vowels are analyzed as separate phonemes from short vowels:
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Vowel length contrasts with more than two phonemic levels are rare, and several hypothesized cases of three-level vowel length can be analysed without postulating this typologically unusual configuration.[2] 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 *saa+tta+k */sɑːtˑɑk/ "send (saatta-) +(imperative)", and the overlong 'aa' in saada comes from *saa+dak "get+(infinitive)". As for languages that have three lengths, independent of vowel quality or syllable structure, these include Dinka, Mixe, Yavapai and Wichita. An example from Mixe is pronounced as /[poʃ]/ "guava", pronounced as /[poˑʃ]/ "spider", pronounced as /[poːʃ]/ "knot". In Dinka the longest vowels are three moras long, and so are best analyzed as overlong e.g. pronounced as //oːː//.
Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in Kikamba, there is pronounced as /[ko.ko.na]/, pronounced as /[kóó.ma̋]/, pronounced as /[ko.óma̋]/, pronounced as /[nétónubáné.éetɛ̂]/ "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".
In many varieties of English, vowels contrast with each other both in length and in quality, and descriptions differ in the relative importance given to these two features. Some descriptions of Received Pronunciation and more widely some descriptions of English phonology group all non-diphthongal vowels into the categories "long" and "short", convenient terms for grouping the many vowels of English.[3] [4] [5] Daniel Jones proposed that phonetically similar pairs of long and short vowels could be grouped into single phonemes, distinguished by the presence or absence of phonological length (Chroneme).[6] The usual long-short pairings for RP are /iː + ɪ/, /ɑː + æ/, /ɜ: + ə/, /ɔː + ɒ/, /u + ʊ/, but Jones omits /ɑː + æ/. This approach is not found in present-day descriptions of English. Vowels show allophonic variation in length and also in other features according to the context in which they occur. The terms tense (corresponding to long) and lax (corresponding to short) are alternative terms that do not directly refer to length.[7]
In Australian English, there is contrastive vowel length in closed syllables between long and short pronounced as //e// and pronounced as //ɐ//. The following are minimal pairs of length:
| pronounced as //ˈfeɹiː// ferry | pronounced as //ˈfeːɹiː// fairy | ||
| pronounced as //ˈkɐt// cut | pronounced as //ˈkɐːt// cart |
In most varieties of English, for instance Received Pronunciation and General American, there is allophonic variation in vowel length depending on the value of the consonant that follows it: vowels are shorter before voiceless consonants and are longer when they come before voiced consonants.[8] Thus, the vowel in bad pronounced as //bæd// is longer than the vowel in bat pronounced as //bæt//. Also compare neat with need . The vowel sound in "beat" is generally pronounced for about 190 milliseconds, but the same vowel in "bead" lasts 350 milliseconds in normal speech, the voiced final consonant influencing vowel length.
Cockney English features short and long varieties of the closing diphthong pronounced as /[ɔʊ]/. The short pronounced as /[ɔʊ]/ corresponds to RP pronounced as //ɔː// in morphologically closed syllables (see thought split), whereas the long pronounced as /[ɔʊː]/ corresponds to the non-prevocalic sequence pronounced as //ɔːl// (see l-vocalization). The following are minimal pairs of length:
| pronounced as /[ˈfɔʊʔ]/ fort/fought | pronounced as /[ˈfɔʊːʔ]/ fault | ||
| pronounced as /[ˈpɔʊz]/ pause | pronounced as /[ˈpɔʊːz]/ Paul's | ||
| pronounced as /[ˈwɔʊʔə]/ water | pronounced as /[ˈwɔʊːʔə]/ Walter |
The difference is lost in running speech, so that fault falls together with fort and fought as pronounced as /[ˈfɔʊʔ]/ or pronounced as /[ˈfoːʔ]/. The contrast between the two diphthongs is phonetic rather than phonemic, as the pronounced as //l// can be restored in formal speech: pronounced as /[ˈfoːɫt]/ etc., which suggests that the underlying form of pronounced as /[ˈfɔʊːʔ]/ is pronounced as //ˈfoːlt// (John Wells says that the vowel is equally correctly transcribed with (IPA|ɔʊ) or (IPA|oʊ), not to be confused with pronounced as //ʌʊ/, [ɐɤ]/). Furthermore, a vocalized word-final pronounced as //l// is often restored before a word-initial vowel, so that fall out pronounced as /[fɔʊl ˈæəʔ]/ (cf. thaw out pronounced as /[fɔəɹ ˈæəʔ]/, with an intrusive pronounced as //r//) is somewhat more likely to contain the lateral pronounced as /link/ than fall pronounced as /[fɔʊː]/. The distinction between pronounced as /[ɔʊ]/ and pronounced as /[ɔʊː]/ exists only word-internally before consonants other than intervocalic pronounced as //l//. In the morpheme-final position only pronounced as /[ɔʊː]/ occurs (with the vowel being realized as pronounced as /[ɔə ~ ɔː ~ ɔʊə]/), so that all pronounced as /[ɔʊː]/ is always distinct from or pronounced as /[ɔə]/. Before the intervocalic pronounced as //l// pronounced as /[ɔʊː]/ is the banned diphthong, though here either of the vowels can occur, depending on morphology (compare falling pronounced as /[ˈfɔʊlɪn]/ with aweless pronounced as /[ˈɔəlɪs]/).
In Cockney, the main difference between pronounced as //ɪ// and pronounced as //ɪə//, pronounced as //e// and pronounced as //eə// as well as pronounced as //ɒ// and pronounced as //ɔə// is length, not quality, so that his pronounced as /[ɪz]/, merry pronounced as /[ˈmɛɹɪi]/ and Polly pronounced as /[ˈpɒlɪi ~ ˈpɔlɪi]/ differ from here's pronounced as /[ɪəz ~ ɪːz]/, Mary pronounced as /[ˈmɛəɹɪi ~ ˈmɛːɹɪi]/ and poorly pronounced as /[ˈpɔəlɪi ~ ˈpɔːlɪi]/ (see cure-force merger) mainly in length. In broad Cockney, the contrast between pronounced as //æ// and pronounced as //æʊ// is also mainly one of length; compare hat pronounced as /[æʔ]/ with out pronounced as /[æəʔ ~ æːʔ]/ (cf. the near-RP form pronounced as /[æʊʔ]/, with a wide closing diphthong).
In the teaching of English, vowels are commonly said to have a "short" and a "long" version. The terms "short" and "long" are not accurate from a linguistic point of view—at least in the case of Modern English—as the vowels are not actually short and long versions of the same sound; the terminology is a historical holdover due to their arising from proper vowel length in Middle English. The phonetic values of these vowels are shown in the table below.
| letter | "short" | "long" | examples | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| a | pronounced as //æ// | pronounced as //eɪ// | mat / mate | |
| e | pronounced as //ɛ// | pronounced as //iː// | pet / Pete | |
| i | pronounced as //ɪ// | pronounced as //aɪ// | twin / twine | |
| o | pronounced as //ɒ// | pronounced as //oʊ// | not / note | |
| oo | pronounced as //ʊ// | pronounced as //uː// | wood / wooed | |
| u | pronounced as //ʌ// | pronounced as //juː// | cub / cube |
In some types of phonetic transcription (e.g. pronunciation respelling), "long" vowel letters may be marked with a macron; for example, ⟨ā⟩ may be used to represent the IPA sound /eɪ/. This is sometimes used in dictionaries, most notably in Merriam-Webster[9] (see Pronunciation respelling for English for more).
Similarly, the short vowel letters are rarely represented in teaching reading of English in the classroom by the symbols ă, ĕ, ĭ, ŏ, o͝o, and ŭ. The long vowels are more often represented by a horizontal line above the vowel: ā, ē, ī, ō, o͞o, and ū.[10]
Vowel length may often be traced to assimilation. In Australian English, the second element pronounced as /[ə]/ of a diphthong pronounced as /[eə]/ has assimilated to the preceding vowel, giving the pronunciation of bared as pronounced as /[beːd]/, creating a contrast with the short vowel in bed pronounced as /[bed]/.
Another common source is the vocalization of a consonant such as the voiced velar fricative pronounced as /[ɣ]/ or voiced palatal fricative or even an approximant, as the English 'r'. A historically-important example is the laryngeal theory, which states that long vowels in the Indo-European languages were formed from short vowels, followed by any one of the several "laryngeal" sounds of Proto-Indo-European (conventionally written h1, h2 and h3). When a laryngeal sound followed a vowel, it was later lost in most Indo-European languages, and the preceding vowel became long. However, Proto-Indo-European had long vowels of other origins as well, usually as the result of older sound changes, such as Szemerényi's law and Stang's law.
Vowel length may also have arisen as an allophonic quality of a single vowel phoneme, which may have then become split in two phonemes. For example, the Australian English phoneme pronounced as //æː// was created by the incomplete application of a rule extending pronounced as //æ// before certain voiced consonants, a phenomenon known as the bad–lad split. An alternative pathway to the phonemicization of allophonic vowel length is the shift of a vowel of a formerly-different quality to become the short counterpart of a vowel pair. That too is exemplified by Australian English, whose contrast between pronounced as //a// (as in duck) and pronounced as //aː// (as in dark) was brought about by a lowering of the earlier pronounced as //ʌ//.
Estonian, a Finnic language, has a rare phenomenon in which allophonic length variation has become phonemic after the deletion of the suffixes causing the allophony. Estonian had already inherited two vowel lengths from Proto-Finnic, but a third one was then introduced. For example, the Finnic imperative marker *-k caused the preceding vowels to be articulated shorter. After the deletion of the marker, the allophonic length became phonemic, as shown in the example above.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet the sign pronounced as /ː/ (not a colon, but two triangles facing each other in an hourglass shape; Unicode) is used for both vowel and consonant length. This may be doubled for an extra-long sound, or the top half (pronounced as /ˑ/) may be used to indicate that a sound is "half long". A breve is used to mark an extra-short vowel or consonant.
Estonian has a three-way phonemic contrast:
saada pronounced as /[saːːda]/ "to get" (overlong)
saada pronounced as /[saːda]/ "send!" (long)
sada pronounced as /[sada]/ "hundred" (short)
Although not phonemic, a half-long distinction can also be illustrated in certain accents of English:
bead pronounced as /[biːd]/
beat pronounced as /[biˑt]/
bid pronounced as /[bɪˑd]/
bit pronounced as /[bɪt]/
Consistent use: byta pronounced as //²byːta// 'to change' vs bytta pronounced as //²bʏtːa// 'tub' and koma pronounced as //²koːma// 'coma' vs komma pronounced as //²kɔma// 'to come'
Inconsistent use: fält pronounced as //ˈfɛlt// 'a field' and kam pronounced as //ˈkamː// 'a comb' (but the verb 'to comb' is kamma)
Some languages make no distinction in writing. This is particularly the case with ancient languages such as Old English. Modern edited texts often use macrons with long vowels, however. Australian English does not distinguish the vowels pronounced as //æ// from pronounced as //æː// in spelling, with words like 'span' or 'can' having different pronunciations depending on meaning.
In non-Latin writing systems, a variety of mechanisms have also evolved.