Describing vowels

Whereas consonants can generally be described in terms of the nature of the closure in the vocal tract, vowels present a challenge in that there is no full contact between articulators, so we are left with the task of describing tongue position in vocal space. To address this problem, phoneticians have identified a number of anchor points in relation to which vowels may be located in phonetic space: these are known as cardinal vowels, and they correspond, as we will see, fairly well to the main vowels of standard French.

These cardinal vowels are located within an idealized version of the vocal tract known as the vowel quadrilateral (shown in the diagram on the next page). These vowels are numbered for ease of reference: phoneticians refer to the primary cardinal vowels 1–8, shown in bold, and the secondary cardinal vowels 9–16, shown in brackets.

Cardinals 1–4 are all pronounced with the tongue raised at the front of the mouth, and for this reason are called front vowels. Try producing the vowel in ski, keeping your tongue perfectly still (imagine the French or Scottish pronunciation): you’ll notice that your tongue is raised almost as far forward and as close to the roof of your mouth as it can go without actually making contact. The vowel you’re producing, [i] (Cardinal 1), is therefore a close (or high) front vowel. By contrast, the vowel [a] in RP cat for which the mouth is generally wide open and the tongue raised at the bottom of the vocal tract, is an open (or low) front vowel. The two intermediate vowels, [e] and [ ε ], those of French thé and belle respectively (and similar to the vowels in Scots English cake and English English head), are known as half-close (or high-mid) and half-open (or low-mid).