pronounced as /notice/In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Creek language[1]), and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.
Vowels which have undergone vowel reduction may be called reduced or weak. In contrast, an unreduced vowel may be described as full or strong. The prototypical reduced vowel in English is schwa. In Australian English, that is the only reduced vowel, though other dialects have additional ones.
| Near- front | Central | Near- back | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Near-close | pronounced as /ᵻ/ (pronounced as /ɨ/) | pronounced as /ᵿ/ (pronounced as /ɵ/) | |||
| Mid | pronounced as /ə/ | ||||
| Near-open | pronounced as /ɐ/ | ||||
Phonetic reduction most often involves a mid-centralization of the vowel, that is, a reduction in the amount of movement of the tongue in pronouncing the vowel, as with the characteristic change of many unstressed vowels at the ends of English words to something approaching schwa. A well-researched type of reduction is that of the neutralization of acoustic distinctions in unstressed vowels, which occurs in many languages. The most common reduced vowel is schwa.
Whereas full vowels are distinguished by height, backness, and roundness, according to, reduced unstressed vowels are largely unconcerned with height or roundness. English pronounced as //ə//, for example, may range phonetically from mid pronounced as /[ə]/ to pronounced as /[ɐ]/ to open pronounced as /[a]/; English pronounced as //ᵻ// ranges from close pronounced as /[ï]/, pronounced as /[ɪ̈]/, pronounced as /[ë]/, to open-mid pronounced as /[ɛ̈]/. The primary distinction is that pronounced as //ᵻ// is further front than pronounced as //ə//, contrasted in the numerous English words ending in unstressed -ia. That is, the jaw, which to a large extent controls vowel height, tends to be relaxed when pronouncing reduced vowels. Similarly, English pronounced as //ᵿ// ranges through pronounced as /[ʊ̈]/ and pronounced as /[ö̜]/; although it may be labialized to varying degrees, the lips are relaxed in comparison to pronounced as //uː//, pronounced as //oʊ//, or pronounced as //ɔː//. The primary distinction in words like folio is again one of backness. However, the backness distinction is not as great as that of full vowels; reduced vowels are also centralized, and are sometimes referred to by that term. They may also be called obscure, as there is no one-to-one correspondence between full and reduced vowels.
Sound duration is a common factor in reduction: In fast speech, vowels are reduced due to physical limitations of the articulatory organs, e.g., the tongue cannot move to a prototypical position fast or completely enough to produce a full-quality vowel (compare with clipping). Different languages have different types of vowel reduction, and this is one of the difficulties in language acquisition (see e.g. Non-native pronunciations of English and Anglophone pronunciation of foreign languages). Vowel reduction of second language speakers is a separate study.
Stress-related vowel reduction is a principal factor in the development of Indo-European ablaut, as well as other changes reconstructed by historical linguistics.
Vowel reduction is one of the sources of distinction between a spoken language and its written counterpart. Vernacular and formal speech often have different levels of vowel reduction, and so the term "vowel reduction" is also applied to differences in a language variety with respect to, e.g., the language standard.
Some languages, such as Finnish, Hindi, and classical Spanish, are claimed to lack vowel reduction. Such languages are often called syllable-timed languages.[2] At the other end of the spectrum, Mexican Spanish is characterized by the reduction or loss of the unstressed vowels, mainly when they are in contact with the sound pronounced as //s//.[3] [4] It can be the case that the words pesos, pesas, and peces are pronounced the same: pronounced as /[ˈpesə̥s]/.
In some cases phonetic vowel reduction may contribute to phonemic (phonological) reduction, which means merger of phonemes, induced by indistinguishable pronunciation. This sense of vowel reduction may occur by means other than vowel centralisation, however.
Many Germanic languages, in their early stages, reduced the number of vowels that could occur in unstressed syllables, without (or before) clearly showing centralisation. Proto-Germanic and its early descendant Gothic still allowed more or less the full complement of vowels and diphthongs to appear in unstressed syllables, except notably short pronounced as //e//, which merged with pronounced as //i//. In early Old High German and Old Saxon, this had been reduced to five vowels (i, e, a, o, u, some with length distinction), later reduced further to just three short vowels (i/e, a, o/u). In Old Norse, likewise, only three vowels were written in unstressed syllables: a, i and u (their exact phonetic quality is unknown). Old English, meanwhile, distinguished only e, a, and u (again the exact phonetic quality is unknown).
See main article: Stress and vowel reduction in English. Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress). Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel (schwa) or with certain other vowels that are described as being "reduced" (or sometimes with a syllabic consonant as the syllable nucleus rather than a vowel). Various phonological analyses exist for these phenomena.
Old Latin had initial stress, and short vowels in non-initial syllables were frequently reduced. Long vowels were usually not reduced.
Vowels reduced in different ways depending on the phonological environment. For instance, in most cases, they reduced to pronounced as //i//. Before l pinguis, an pronounced as //l// not followed by pronounced as //i iː l//, they became Old Latin pronounced as //o// and Classical Latin pronounced as //u//. Before pronounced as //r// and some consonant clusters, they became pronounced as //e//.
Latin: fáctos, *Latin: ád-factos > Latin: fáctos, Latin: áffectos "made, affected" (participles)
In Classical Latin, stress changed position and so in some cases, reduced vowels became stressed. Stress moved to the penult if it was heavy or to the antepenult otherwise.
Latin: fáctus, Latin: afféctus
Vulgar Latin, represented here as the ancestor of the Italo-Western languages, had seven vowels in stressed syllables (pronounced as //a, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u//). In unstressed syllables, pronounced as //ɛ// merged into pronounced as //e// and pronounced as //ɔ// merged into pronounced as //o//, yielding five possible vowels. Some Romance languages, like Italian, maintain this system, while others have made adjustments to the number of vowels permitted in stressed syllables, the number of vowels permitted in unstressed syllables, or both. Some Romance languages, like Spanish, French and Romanian, lack vowel reduction altogether.
Standard Italian has seven stressed vowels and five unstressed vowels, as in Vulgar Latin. Some regional varieties of the language, influenced by local vernaculars, do not distinguish open and closed e and o even in stressed syllables.
Neapolitan has seven stressed vowels and only four unstressed vowels, with e and o merging into pronounced as //ə//. At the end of a word, unstressed a also merges with e and o, reducing the number of vowels permitted in this position to three.
Sicilian has five stressed vowels (pronounced as //a, ɛ, i, ɔ, u//) and three unstressed vowels, with pronounced as //ɛ// merging into pronounced as //i// and pronounced as //ɔ// merging into pronounced as //u//. Unlike Neapolitan, Catalan or Portuguese, Sicilian incorporates this vowel reduction into its orthography.
Catalan has seven or eight vowels in stressed syllables and three, four or five vowels in unstressed syllables, depending on dialect. The Valencian dialect has five, as in Vulgar Latin. Majorcan merges unstressed pronounced as //a// and pronounced as //e//, and central Catalan further merges unstressed pronounced as //o// and pronounced as //u//.
Portuguese has seven or eight vowels in stressed syllables (pronounced as //a, ɐ, ɛ, e, i, ɔ, o, u//). The vowels pronounced as //a// and pronounced as //ɐ//, which are not phonemically distinct in all dialects, merge in unstressed syllables. In most cases, unstressed syllables may have one of five vowels (pronounced as //a, e, i, o, u//), but there is a sometimes unpredictable tendency for pronounced as //e// to merge with pronounced as //i// and pronounced as //o// to merge with pronounced as //u//. For instance some speakers pronounce the first syllable of dezembro ("December") differently from the first syllable of dezoito ("eighteen"), with the latter being more reduced. There are also instances of pronounced as //ɛ// and pronounced as //ɔ// being distinguished from pronounced as //e// and pronounced as //o// in unstressed syllables, especially to avoid ambiguity. The verb pregar ("to nail") is distinct from pregar ("to preach"), and the latter verb was historically spelled prègar to reflect that its unstressed pronounced as //ɛ// is not reduced.
Portuguese phonology is further complicated by its variety of dialects, particularly the differences between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, as well as the differences between the respective dialects of the two varieties.
In the Bulgarian language the vowels а [a], ъ [ɤ], о [ɔ] and е [ɛ] can be partially or fully reduced, depending on the dialect, when unstressed to [ɐ], [ɐ], [o] and [ɪ], respectively. The most prevalent is [a] > [ɐ], [ɤ] > [ɐ] and [ɔ] > [o], which, in its partial form, is considered correct in literary speech. The reduction [ɛ] > [ɪ] is prevalent in the eastern dialects of the language and is not considered formally correct.
See main article: Vowel reduction in Russian. There are six vowel phonemes in Standard Russian. Vowels tend to merge when they are unstressed. The vowels pronounced as //a// and pronounced as //o// have the same unstressed allophones for a number of dialects and reduce to a schwa. Unstressed pronounced as //e// may become more central if it does not merge with pronounced as //i//.
Other types of reduction are phonetic, such as that of the high vowels (pronounced as //i// and pronounced as //u//), which become near-close; этап ('stage') is pronounced pronounced as /[ɪˈtap]/, and мужчина ('man') is pronounced pronounced as /[mʊˈɕːinə]/.
See main article: Havlík's law. Proto-Slavic had two short high vowels known as yers: a short high front vowel, denoted as ĭ or ь, and a short back vowel, denoted as ŭ or ъ. Both vowels underwent reduction and were eventually deleted in certain positions in a word in the early Slavic languages, beginning from the late dialects of Proto-Slavic. The process is known as Havlík's law.
In general, short vowels in Irish are all reduced to schwa (pronounced as /[ə]/) in unstressed syllables, but there are some exceptions. In Munster Irish, if the third syllable of a word is stressed and the preceding two syllables are short, the first of the two unstressed syllables is not reduced to schwa; instead it receives a secondary stress, e.g. Irish: spealadóir pronounced as //ˌsˠpʲal̪ˠəˈd̪ˠoːɾʲ// ('scythe-man'). Also in Munster Irish, an unstressed short vowel is not reduced to schwa if the following syllable contains a stressed pronounced as //iː// or pronounced as //uː//, e.g. Irish: ealaí pronounced as //aˈl̪ˠiː// ('art'), Irish: bailiú pronounced as //bˠaˈlʲuː// ('gather'). In Ulster Irish, long vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened but are not reduced to schwa, e.g. Irish: cailín pronounced as //ˈkalʲinʲ// ('girl'), Irish: galún pronounced as //ˈɡalˠunˠ// ('gallon').