Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Czech, Fijian, Finnish, Japanese, Hawaiian, Classical Latin, Old English, Samoan, and Thai. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of English dialects, and is said to be phonemic in a few dialects, such Australian English and New Zealand English, but this can be a matter of interpretation.
Most languages either do not distinguish vowel length. For the ones that do, the only distinction is between short vowels and long vowels. There are very few languages that distinguish three vowel lengths, for instance Estonian or Wichita. There are also a few words in Japanese with consecutive vowels, such as the place/family name oooka "big hill," which is seen as a long vowel in the first two moras followed by a short vowel in the following mora for ooo.
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Vowel length and stress
In languages that do not have distinctive vowel length, lexical stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length.
Among the languages that have distinctive vowel length, there are some where it may only occur in stressed syllables, e.g. in the Alemannic German dialect. In languages such as Finnish or Classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive in unstressed syllables as well.
Long vowels in English
Vowel length, when applied to English, has several different related meanings.
Traditional non-phonetic "long" and "short" vowels
Traditionally, the vowels /ei iː ai ou juː/ (as in bait beet bite boat beauty) are said to be the "long" counterparts of the vowels /æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʊ/ (as in bat bet bit bot put) which are said to be "short". This terminology reflects the historical pronunciation and development of those vowels and not their actual pronunciation.
Allophonic vowel length
In certain dialects of the modern English language, for instance general American, there is allophonic vowel length: vowels are long before voiced consonants in the coda of a syllable. For example, the vowel /æ/ in bat is short [bæt], because /t/ is unvoiced, while the same vowel /æ/ in bad is long [bæːd], because /d/ is voiced. (Incidentally, the consonants in these syllables also have different relative lengths; the [t] of bat is longer than the [d] of bad.)
Phonemic vowel length
In Australian English and in New Zealand English, there is distinctive phonemic vowel length which distinguishes such minimal pairs as the following (examples from Australian English):
| lust | vs | last |
| bid | vs | beard |
| ferry | vs | fairy |
Notations in the Latin alphabet
Diacritics
- Macron, used to indicate a long vowel in Maori, Latvian and many transcription schemes, including romanizations for Sanskrit, and the Hepburn romanization for Japanese. While not a feature in Latin proper, modern textbooks also use the macron as a teaching aid.
- Breves are used to mark short vowels in several linguistic transcription systems.
- Acute accent, used to indicate a long vowel in Czech, Icelandic, Hungarian and Slovak. The acute is similarly used in Russian textbooks as a teaching aid.
- Circumflex, used unsystematically in Turkish for both vowel length and palatalization. As with acute accents, a vowel with an accent is long, with other vowels being short. The circumflex is occasionally used as a surrogate for the macrons, particularly in the Kunrei-shiki romanization of Japanese.
- Ring, used in Czech, where the character is known as a krouzek and is used for the long U sound, as in kůň "horse".
- Ogonek, used in Lithuanian to indicate long vowels (eg. ą for a long A sound).
Additional letters
- Vowel doubling, used consistently in Estonian, Finnish, and occasionally in Dutch, German. Example: Finnish tuuli /ˈtuːli/ 'wind' vs. tuli /ˈtuli/ 'fire'.
- Estonian also has a rare "overlong" vowel length, but does not distinguish this from the normal long vowel in writing.
- ie is used to mark the long /iː/ sound in Dutch and in German. In German, this is due to the preservation and generalization of a historical ie spelling that originally represented the sound /iə̯/. In northern German, a following e letter lengthens other vowels as well, e.g. in the name Kues /kuːs/.
- A following h is occasionally used in many German words.
Other signs
- Colon (punctuation), commonly used in IPA phonetic transcription but no native writing systems. Vowel length can also be signified by a half-colon (a colon with only the top dot), meaning half-long, and a double colon, meaning twice as long as a regular vowel. This "colon" is actually two triangles facing each other in an hourglass shape instead of the usual two dots. A breve is used to mark a short vowel.
- Estonian is reported to have a three-way phonemic contrast:
- saada [saːda] "to get"
- saada [saˑda] "send!"
- sada [sada] "hundred"
- Estonian is reported to have a three-way phonemic contrast:
- Although not phonemic, the distinction can also be illustrated in English:
- bead [biːd]
- beat [biˑt]
- bit [bɪt]
- police [pə˘liˑs] [this may not display properly in your browser]
- Although not phonemic, the distinction can also be illustrated in English:
- Middle dot, commonly used in non-IPA phonetic transcription, such as the Americanist system developed by linguists for transcribing the indigenous languages of the Americas. Example: Americanist [tʰo·] = IPA [tʰoː].
Notations in other writing systems
In non-Latin writing systems, a variety of mechanisms have also evolved.
- In descendants of the Aramaic alphabet, notably Arabic and Hebrew, long vowels are written with consonant letters (mostly approximant consonant letters), while short vowels are typically omitted entirely. Most of these scripts also have optional diacritics that can be used to mark short vowels when needed.
- In South-Asian abugidas, such as Devanagari or the Thai alphabet, there are different vowel signs for short and long vowels.
- In the Japanese hiragana syllabary, long vowels are indicated by adding a vowel character after a consonant-vowel character.
- Long vowels /a:/, /i:/, and /u:/ are indicated by appending hiraganas あ (a), い (i), う (u) respectively.
- Long vowels /e:/ and /o:/ are commonly indicated by appending hiraganas い (i) and う (u) respectively, however exceptions exist:
- In rare cases, long vowels /e:/ and /o:/ are indicated by appending hiraganas え (e) and お (o) respectively.
- In the Japanese katakana syllabary, long vowels are almost always indicated by adding the special bar symbol ー, as in メーカー mēkā "manufacturer" instead of メカ meka "mecha." The symbol is made vertical in vertical writing.