Vowels are fundamental elements of spoken language, providing insights into linguistic patterns and phonological systems. This study examines vowel inventories from 913 languages in a database, analyzing their statistical distributions. It investigates unique vowels within each language category, focusing on the two major dimensions of vowel height and backness, including diphthongs. The results show that vowel phonemes without diacritics constitute 30% of all distinct vowel types but account for 64% of the total vowel phonemes, highlighting the dominance of primary vowel articulations. The most frequent vowels are /i/, followed by /u/, /a/, /o/, /e/, /ɛ/, and /ɔ/. Multidimensional scaling of vowels, with or without diacritics, reveals distinctive clusters and co-occurrence patterns, necessitating more detailed analysis. Future research should consider the establishment of linguistic criteria on vowel representation and incorporate actual speech data for comprehensive linguistic studies.
... languages of the Niger–Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic language families, which predominate between the Equator and the Sahara, have large vowel ... most common across languages? While languages differ in the number of vowels ...
Most introductions to English phonetics and phonology focus primarily on British or American English, which fails to account for the rich diversity of English varieties globally. This book addresses this gap, providing an overview of English phonetics and phonology through an exploration of the sounds of English around the world, including older varieties of English such as American, Canadian, British, and Australian Englishes, as well as new varieties of English such as Indian, Singaporean, Hong Kong, and Kenyan English. It focuses on diversity in vowels and consonants, allophonic variation, and stress and intonation patterns across regional, ethnic and social varieties of English in North America, The Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. Listening exercises are incorporated thro
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