Open front unrounded vowel

The open front unrounded vowel, also called the low front unrounded vowel, is a special sound used in some spoken languages around the world. It is one of the eight main cardinal vowels, which are reference points used in a system to measure sounds, rather than sounds found in any one specific language.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, this sound is written with the symbol ⟨a⟩, which looks like a double-story lowercase a. On the IPA vowel chart, it appears in the lower-left corner. However, some experts question how exact this chart is, and they have studied the sound using machines to understand it better. Different experts may describe the sound slightly differently.

In everyday use, the symbol ⟨a⟩ is often used for an open central unrounded vowel, especially when studying the history of the English language. Because the difference between open and near-open front vowels is very small and most languages do not use both sounds differently, many people do not worry about having separate symbols for them. If someone needs to be very specific that the vowel sound is fully at the front of the mouth, they can use symbols like ⟨æ̞⟩ or ⟨a̟⟩.

Features

The open front unrounded vowel is a sound used in some languages. The tongue is positioned low in the mouth, far from the roof. It is also positioned forward in the mouth, without creating a tight shape that would make it a consonant.

Additionally, the lips are not rounded when making this sound.

Occurrence

Many languages use a special vowel sound that is not rounded. In languages that only have one open vowel sound, the letter ⟨a⟩ can represent this sound because it is part of the basic alphabet. When shown this way, the sound is a bit more like [ä] than the front [a], but sometimes the difference is small.