In phonetics, length or quantity is a feature of sounds that are distinctively longer than other sounds. There are long vowels as well as long consonants (the latter are often called geminates). Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone meaning sound, voice) is the study of the sounds of human speech. ... In linguistics, distinctive features are the elements which distinguish one phoneme or allophone from one another. ... In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. ... In phonetics, consonant length is when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. ...

Many languages do not have distinctive length. Among the languages that have distinctive length, there are only a few that have both distinctive vowel length and distinctive consonant length. It is more common that there is only one or that they depend on each other.

The languages that distinguish between different lengths have usually long and short sounds. According to some linguists, Estonian and some Sami languages have three phonemic (meaning-distinguishing) lengths for consonants and vowels. Sami is a general name for a group of Uralic languages spoken in parts of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and extreme northwestern Russia, in Northern Europe. ...

Strictly speaking, a pair of a long sound and a short sound should be identical except for their length. In certain languages, however, there are pairs of phonemes that are traditionally considered to be long-short pairs even though they differ not only in length, but also in quality, for instance English "long e" which is /iː/ (as in weed /wiːd/) vs. "short e" which is /ɛ/ (as in wed /wɛd/) or German "long e" which is /eː/ (as in Beet /beːt/ 'garden bed') vs. "short e" which is /ɛ/ (as in Bett /bɛt/ '(sleeping) bed'). Also, tonal contour may reinforce the length, as in Estonian, where the over-long length is concomitant with a tonal variation resembling tonal stress marking. In human language, a phoneme is the theoretical representation of a sound. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

In non-linear phonology, the feature of length is often not a feature of a specific sound segment, but rather of the whole syllable. Phonology (Greek phonē = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language (or languages). ...

See also Chroneme. In spoken language, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant. ...

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