In Englishphonetics and phonology, checked vowels are those that must be followed by a consonant in a stressedsyllable, while free vowels are those that may stand in a stressed open syllable with no following consonant. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), or phonemics, is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. ... A consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a closure or stricture sufficient to cause audible turbulence, at one or more points along the vocal tract. ... In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ... A syllable (ancient Greek: συλλαβή) is a unit of speech that is made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with one or more optional phones (single sounds or phonetic segments). Syllables are often considered the phonological building blocks of words. ...
In General American, the checked vowels are: General American is a notional accent of American English based on speech patterns common in the Midwest of the United States and those used by many American network television broadcasters. ...
/ɪ/ as in bit
/ɛ/ as in bet
/æ/ as in bat
/ʊ/ as in put
/ʌ/ as in but
The free vowels are:
/i/ as in bee
/e/ (also transcribed /eɪ/) as in bay
/u/ as in boo
/o/ (also transcribed /oʊ/) as in bow (a tool for shooting arrows; a tool for playing a stringed instrument)
/ɔ/ as in paw
/ɑ/ as in bra
/ɝ/ as in burr
/aɪ/ as in buy
/aʊ/ as in bow (to bend at the waist; a part of a ship)
/ɔɪ/ as in boy
The schwa/ə/ and rhotacized schwa /ɚ/ not usually are considered either free or checked, since they cannot stand in stressed syllables at all. In linguistics and phonology, schwa is the tonally-neutral, mid-central unrounded vowel sound, exactly in the middle of the vowel chart. ... In phonetics, an r-colored vowel or rhotacized vowel is a vowel either with the tip or blade of the tongue turned up during at least part of the articulation of the vowel (a retroflex articulation) or with the the tip of the tongue down and the back of the...
The terms checked vowel and free vowel correspond closely to the terms lax vowel and tense vowel respectively, but many linguists prefer to use the terms checked and free as there is no clearcut phonetic definition of vowel tenseness, and since by most attempted definitions of tenseness /ɔ/ and /ɑ/ are considered lax, even though they behave in American English as free vowels. Tenseness is a term used in phonology to describe a particular vowel quality that is phonemically contrastive in many languages, including English. ... American English is the form of the English language used mostly in the United States of America. ...
In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract.
Furthermore, in English some vowel sounds are represented by combinations of vowel letters, such as the ea in beat or by a vowel letter and an approximant letter, as the ow in how, or the er in her.
Vowels are especially important to the structures of words in languages that have very few consonants (like Polynesian languages such as Maori and Hawaiian), and in languages whose inventory of vowels is larger than its inventory of consonants (like Sedang, a relative of Vietnamese, which contrasts 55 different vowel qualities).
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