The fact that ten vowels have been reconstructed for proto-Atlantic, proto-Ijoid and possibly proto-Volta – Congo leads Williamson ( 1989: 23 ) to the hypothesis that the original vowel inventory of Niger – Congo was a full ten-vowel system.

There are many languages ( such as Romanian ) that contrast one or more rising diphthongs with similar sequences of a glide and a vowel in their phonetic inventory ( see semivowel for examples ).

Abaza, like its relatives in the family of Northwest Caucasian languages, is highly agglutinative and has a large consonantal inventory ( 63 phonemes ) coupled with a minimal vowel inventory ( two vowels ).

With the exception of " ò " and " ù ", the marked vowels account for a relatively small percentage of the vowel inventory, as can be seen in the distribution chart.

Shoshoni has a typical Numic vowel inventory of five vowels.

It has a larger vowel inventory than Georgian ; the Upper Bal dialect of Svan has the most vowels of any Kartvelian language, having both long and short versions of plus, a total of 18 vowels ( Georgian, by contrast, has just five ).

Osage has an inventory of sounds very similar to that of Dakota, plus vowel length, preaspirated obstruents, and an interdental fricative ( like " th " in English " then ").

Note that the vowels below represent the phonetic inventory, meaning the set of all ( or most ) sounds in the language ; the phonemic inventory, those sounds which contrastively mark differences in meaning, are highlighted in the list below the vowel charts.

The Ge ' ez vowel inventory has almost been preserved except that the two vowels which are phonetically close to and seem to have evolved into a pair of phonemes which have the same quality ( the same articulation ) but differ in length ; vs..

The phonology of Tzeltal is quite straightforward with a common vowel inventory and a typical consonant inventory for Mayan languages.

The phoneme inventory of Muscogee Creek consists of thirteen consonants and three vowel qualities, which distinguish length and nasalization.

Timbisha also has a typical Numic vowel inventory of five vowels.

The phonology of Swedish is notable for having a large vowel inventory, with nine vowels distinguished in quality and to some degree quantity, making 17 vowel phonemes in most dialects.

Special to Finnish is a narrow phoneme inventory and vowel harmony.

Proto-Uralic had vowel harmony and a rather large inventory of vowels in initial syllables, much like the modern Finnish or Estonian system:

Itelmen has a larger phonological inventory than other Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages, and permits complex consonant clusters in some environments but has a different system of vowel harmony than its relatives Chukchi and Koryak.

Wari ’ has two phonetic oddities: its " skewed " vowel inventory, and the voiceless bilabially post-trilled dental stop, which is only reported from four other languages, and is only phonemic in Wari ' and two neighbouring languages.

Diachronically, Persian possessed a distinction of length in its underlying vowel inventory, contrasting the long vowels,, with the short vowels,, respectively.

There exist pairs of long and short vowels with overlapping vowel quality giving Australian English phonemic length distinction, which is unusual amongst the various dialects of English, though not unknown elsewhere, such as in regional south-eastern dialects of the UK and eastern seaboard dialects in the US .< ref >

As in Italian, the grapheme < i > appears in some digraphs and trigraphs in which it does not represent the phonemic vowel.

Japanese has five vowels, and vowel length is phonemic, with each having both a short and a long version.

If the nasal consonant is lost but the vowel retains its nasalized pronunciation, nasalization becomes phonemic, that is, distinctive.

The following examples show that vowel length is phonemic in Māori:

In general, the ten-vowel system of Classical Latin ( not counting the Greek letter y ), which relied on phonemic vowel length, was newly modelled into one in which vowel length distinctions lost phonemic importance, and qualitative distinctions of height became more prominent.

The high and low pitches are phonemic, while vowel devoicing is governed by environmental rules, making voiceless vowels allophones of the voiced vowels.

A characteristic sound change ( a phonemic split ) occurred in the majority of East Asian and Southeast Asian languages, typically happening c. 1000 – 1500 AD, in which a former distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants at the beginning of a syllable was lost, in the process transferring the former voicing distinction onto the syllabic nucleus ( i. e. the following vowel ).

It has a phonemic distinction between 3 vowel lengths.

In Danish many of the vowel phonemes have distinct pharyngealized qualities, and in the Tuu languages epiglottalized vowels are phonemic.

Zero-dimensional vowel systems ( one phonemic vowel only ) have been postulated for some Abkhaz dialects, Nuxálk, and for Kabardian ; however,.

Kazakh has a vertical vowel system in that backness is not phonemic ; however, it is not one-dimensional.

Orthographies with a high grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence ( excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation ) include those of Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Turkish ( apart from ğ and various palatal and vowel allophones ), Serbo-Croatian ( Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ), Bulgarian, Macedonian ( if the apostrophe is counted, though slight inconsistencies may be found ), Eastern Armenian ( apart from o, v ), Basque ( apart from palatalized l, n ), Haitian Creole, Castilian Spanish ( apart from h, x, b / v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z ), Czech ( apart from ě, ů, y, ý ), Polish ( apart from ó, h, rz ), Romanian ( apart from distinguishing semivowels from vowels ), Ukrainian ( mainly phonemic with some other historical / morphological rules, as well as palatalization ), Swahili ( missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties and are sparsely used anyways ), Mongolian ( apart from letters representing multiple sounds depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate / ŋ / from / n / and voiced versus voiceless consonants ) Azerbaijani ( apart from k ), and Kazakh ( apart from и, у, х, щ, ю ).

Some phonemic orthographies are slightly defective: Malay, Italian, Lithuanian, and Welsh do not fully distinguish their vowels, Serbian and Croatian do not distinguish tone and vowel length, Somali does not distinguish vowel phonation, etc.

Orthographies such as those of German, Hungarian ( mainly phonemic with " ly, j " representing the same sound, but consonant and vowel length are not always accurate and various spellings reflect etymology, not pronunciation ), Portuguese, and that of the modern Greek language ( written with the Greek alphabet ), as well as Korean hangul, are sometimes considered to be of intermediate depth ( for example they include many morphophonemic features, as described above ).

Even though vowel length is phonemic in German, it is not consistently represented.

Middle Chinese had a structure much like many modern varieties ( especially conservative ones such as Cantonese ), with largely monosyllabic words, little or no derivational morphology, four tone-classes ( though three phonemic tones ), and a syllable structure consisting of initial consonant, glide, main vowel and final consonant, with a large number of initial consonants and a fairly small number of final consonants.

The open front rounded vowel, or low front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, not confirmed to be phonemic in any spoken languages.

The omission of vowels was not a satisfactory solution and some " weak " consonants were used to indicate the vowel quality of a syllable ( matres lectionis ).

Abugidas always mark the vowels ( other than the " inherent " vowel ) with a diacritic, a minor attachment to the letter, or a standalone glyph.

" Impure " abjads have characters for some vowels, optional vowel diacritics, or both.

This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent or optional.

Tāna of the Maldives has dependent vowels and a zero vowel sign, but no inherent vowel.

Until 1945, Bulgarian orthography did not reveal this alternation and used the original Old Slavic Cyrillic letter yat (), which was commonly called двойно е ( dvoyno e ) at the time, to express the historical yat vowel or at least root vowels displaying the ya – e alternation.

Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a syllable: The most sonorous part of the syllable ( that is, the part that's easiest to sing ), called the syllabic peak or nucleus, is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins ( called the onset and coda ) are typically consonants.

However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut: there are syllabic consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the world's languages.

The nasal vowels are represented by the vowel plus n, m or gn.

Due to the limited number of runes, some runes were used for a range of phonemes, such as the rune for the vowel u which was also used for the vowels o, ø and y, and the rune for i which was also used for e.

Because of vowel harmony, all vowels in a word are affected, so the scope of the diacritic is the entire word.

:* Turkish uses a G with a breve ( Ğ ), two letters with an umlaut ( Ö and Ü, representing two rounded front vowels ), two letters with a cedilla ( Ç and Ş, representing the affricate and the fricative ), and also possesses a dotted capital İ ( and a dotless lowercase ı representing a high unrounded back vowel ).

Henry Sweet did much work on the systematic description of vowels, producing an elaborate system of vowel description involving a multitude of symbols.

Lip-rounding is also built into the system, so that front vowels ( such as e, a ) have spread or neutral lip postures, but the back vowels ( such as ) have more marked lip-rounding as vowel height increases.

Eventually Jones also devised symbols for central vowels and positioned these on the vowel diagram.

With the passing years, the accuracy of many of Jones's statements on vowels has come increasingly under question, and most linguists now consider that the vowel quadrilateral must be viewed as a way of representing auditory space in visual form, rather than the tightly defined articulatory scheme envisaged by Jones.

* For vowels as an independent syllable ( in writing, unattached to a consonant ), either at the beginning of a word or ( in Hindi ) after another vowel, there are full-letter forms.

Pallottino regarded this variation in vowels as " instability in the quality of vowels " and accounted for the second phase ( e. g. Herecele ) as " vowel harmony, i. e., of the assimilation of vowels in neighboring syllables ...."

The Etruscan vowel system consisted of four distinct vowels.