VOWEL LENGTH

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the
chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in
Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an
important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic, Czech, Hindi,
Sanskrit, Fijian, Finnish, Japanese, Hawaiian, Hungarian, Classical Latin, Lombard, German,
Dutch, Latvian, Old English, Samoan, Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in
the majority of English dialects, and is said to be phonemic in a few dialects, such as
Australian English and New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in
Cantonese, which is exceptional among the spoken variants of Chinese.

Most languages do not distinguish vowel length, and for those that do, usually the
only distinction is between short vowels and long vowels. There are very few languages that
distinguish three vowel lengths, for instance Mixe. Some languages, such as Finnish,
Estonian and Japanese, also have words where long vowels are immediately followed by
more vowels, e.g. Japanese hōō "phoenix" or Estonian jäääär "ice edge".

Vowel length and related features

Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For
example, French long vowels always occur on stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with
two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length. This gives four
distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long
unstressed vowels, and a half-long vowel, which is a short vowel found in a syllable
immediately preceded by a stressed short vowel, e.g. i-so.

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
Czech, Finnish or Classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive in unstressed syllables as well.

In some languages, vowel length is sometimes better analyzed as a sequence of two identical
vowels. In Baltic-Finnic languages, such as Finnish, the simplest example follows from
consonant gradation: haka → haan. In some cases, it is caused by a following chroneme,
which is etymologically a consonant, e.g. jää " ← Proto-Finno-Ugric *jäŋe. In noninitial
syllables, it is ambiguous if long vowels are vowel clusters – poems written in the Kalevala
meter often syllabicate between the vowels, and an (etymologically original) intervocalic -h-
is seen in this and some modern dialects.

In Japanese, most long vowels are the results of the phonetic change of diphthongs; au and ou
became ō, iu became yū, eu became yō, and now ei is becoming ē. The change occurred after
the loss of intervocalic phoneme /h/. For example, modern kyōto (Kyoto) exhibits the
following changes: kyauto > kyoːto. Another example is shōnen (boy): seunen > syoːnen
(shoːnen). There is no lengthening.

Phonemic vowel length

Many languages make a phonemic distinction between long and short vowels: Japanese,
Finnish, Hungarian, etc.

Long vowels may or may not be separate phonemes. In Latin and Hungarian, long vowels are
separate phonemes from short vowels, thus doubling the number of vowel phonemes.

Latin vowels

Front Central Back

short long short long short long

High /i/ /iː/ /u/ /uː/

Mid /e/ /eː/ /o/ /oː/

Low /a/ /aː/

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 oʊ juː/ (as in bait beet bite boat beauty) are said to be the
"long" counterparts of the vowels /æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ/ (as in bat bet bit bot but) which are said to be
"short". This terminology reflects their pronunciation before the Great Vowel Shift, rather
than their present-day pronunciations. A linguistically more accurate description is that the
former are diphthongs (except for /iː/), while the latter are monophthongs ("pure" vowels).
Allophonic vowel length

In certain dialects of the modern English language, for instance General American and, to
some extent, British Received Pronunciation, there is allophonic vowel length: vowel
phonemes are realized as longer vowel allophones before voiced consonant phonemes in the
coda of a syllable. For example, the vowel phoneme /æ/ in /ˈbæt/ ‘bat’ is realized as a short
allophone [æ] in [ˈbæt], because the /t/ phoneme is unvoiced, while the same vowel /æ/
phoneme in /ˈbæd/ ‘bad’ is realized as a long allophone (which could be transcribed as
[ˈbæːd]), because /d/ is voiced. (Incidentally, the final consonant allophones in these syllables
also have different relative lengths; the [t] of bat is longer than the [d] of bad.)

Symbolic representation of the two allophonic rules:

/æ/ → [æː] | _ /+con +vcd/

/ˈbæd/ → [ˈbæːd]
/æ/ → [æ] | _ /+con -vcd/
/ˈbæt/ → [ˈbæt]

In addition, the vowels of Received Pronunciation are commonly divided into short and long,
as obvious from their transcription. The short vowels are /ɪ/ (as in kit), /ʊ/ (as in foot), /e/ (as
in dress), /ʌ/ (as in strut), /æ/ (as in trap), /ɒ/ (as in lot), and /ə/ (as in the first syllable of ago
and in the second of sofa). The long vowels are /iː/ (as in fleece), /uː/ (as in goose), /ɜː/ (as in
nurse), /ɔː/ as in north and thought, and /ɑː/ (as in father and start). While a different degree
of length is indeed present, there are also differences in the quality (lax vs tense) of these
vowels, and the currently prevalent view tends to emphasise the latter rather than the former.

Contrastive vowel length

In Australian English, there is contrastive vowel length. The following are minimal pairs of
length for many speakers:

[feɹi] ferry Vs [feːɹi] fairy

[spæn] span past tense of spin Vs [spæːn] as in wing span
[kæn] can meaning able to vs [kæːn] as in tin can
[bɪd] bid vs [bɪːd] beard