So let's talk about sounds. Some sounds reach you really easily, like a bear roaring at you.
Other sounds are less likely to make it to your eardrums, like a rabbit nibbling a carrot.
When it comes to language, what are the noisiest, soundiest sounds we have?
What line should you follow to get your message across? I'm Moti Lieberman,
and this is the Ling Space.
So a few weeks back, we did our episode about consonants. Consonants are the different ways that we
can stop or constrict the airflow coming out of the lungs. And there are some good and noisy consonants,
like nnnn and zzzz. But there's more than just consonants to language! A whole bunch of the
sounds that come popping out of our mouths have airflow that's free and easy.
When you don't have anything getting in the way of the noise coming out of your face,
that’s when you get a sound that's really loud and sonorous, something that really stands out.
What you get is a vowel. Vowels are the most sonorous things out there.
Since they’re the conductors on the acoustic train, they can do things that other sounds
can't. For example, when you want to build a syllable, you need something to scaffold
that bit of speech around - and a vowel makes a perfect nucleus. It's so loud and clear
that other less-noisy sounds like consonants can hitch a ride with it, all the way to Syllabletown.
Think about a word like “duck". The sounds at the beginning and the end are super weak
in terms of how loud they are. No air’s escaping the mouth at all, and you can’t
tell what sounds [d] and [k] are just by themselves. But throw a little
[ʌ] in the middle, and that vowel rescues those needy consonants and carries them into audibility.
You can find real evidence of how special vowels are, beyond just how they sound.
If you take a picture of the sound waves for a word like "boss", the vowel really
stands out. This view on speech sounds is called acoustic phonetics, and we’ll talk
about it a lot more in the future. For now, though, the greater height of the vowel’s
peak shows you how much louder it is than the consonants to either side.
So, vowels all have a lot in common: they’re loud, they’re clear, and they can carry
the weight of a syllable. But they obviously don’t all sound the same. Just like with
consonants, the way that we shape our mouths will change the shape of the sounds that come out of them.
And just like with consonants, all the possible vowels of the world have been placed handily
on a chart, like this.
So if you look at it, probably the first thing that you notice is that it’s this weird shape! That’s
actually more or less the shape of the inside of the mouth, where all the vowels get made.
See? We’ve got the front of the mouth over here, and the back over there.
Sounds written at the top of the chart are pronounced with your tongue higher up, so the
space through your mouth is smaller, more closed. The air can still flow freely through - it’s
no consonant. It’s all relative, so the further down you go in the chart, the more open your mouth gets. That’s
why when you go to a doctor, they tell you to say [ɑ], and not [i]. This information,
along with a couple other parameters we’ll get to in a minute, can define the
28 different vowel sounds that we find in the chart.
But wait, you say. 28 different vowels? Aren’t there, like, five? A E I O U, right? Well,
we’re going to have to take a big step back from spelling again. If you just close your
eyes and listen, or if you look at the International Phonetic Alphabet instead of English,
you'll see that there’s a big difference between the “a” in cap and the one in cape.
But yeah, 28 vowels. The big articulator that moves around to give us our different vowel
configurations is the tongue. If you say a word like “soup”, you can feel
that the tongue is higher up than when you make the vowel in a word like “soap”. [u], [o], [u],
[o] Right?
Of course, moving your tongue up and down isn’t the only way to put your stamp on
a vowel. You also move it forward and back. So feel what you’re doing with your tongue when you say a word
with a front vowel, like in [ʃit], as opposed to one with the same consonants, but with a back vowel,
like in [ʃut]. Can you feel your tongue moving forward and back? [i], [u], [i], [u].
Ah, the siren call of vowels.
The tongue isn’t the only player in the vowel game, though. Your lips also get involved.
So, vowels can vary depending on whether your lips are rounded while you're making them, or not.
Try saying “Cony”, and instead of thinking about your tongue, focus on what your lips
are doing. They’re pretty round when you say the “o”, and pretty flat when you
say the “i”! Cony.
Of the big pile of vowels that we can find in the chart, we use 11 of them in my dialect of English, although
that will definitely vary depending on what variety you speak. And not all languages have
the same number of vowels, or the same ones. As it happens, vowels are responsible
for a lot of the differences we see in the particular soundscapes of the world’s languages.
We can also hear them in people’s accents when they’re speaking in a language that
isn’t the one that they grew up with.
Let’s look at a couple of examples that just have to do with rounding. So the only
difference between the close front vowel [i] and its buddy, the French [y], is whether
the lips are rounded or not! They’re rounded for y, and everything else is the same. If you're
a monolingual English speaker, this might not feel natural to do, but let's give it a shot:
iiyyiiyyii.... Yeah.
You get the opposite with the Japanese u-ish sound, [ɯ]. In English, we round the lips
when making an u. Japanese on the other hand keeps them flat, like you were making an [i] or an [e].
You can try this too, but it might feel even weirder: uuɯɯuuɯɯuuɯɯ... Now, no language
in the world has all 28 vowels in the chart.
There are a couple of ways that linguists have for explaining why languages don’t use ALL
THE VOWELS, but let’s try this. If you’re communicating with someone, you probably want
your message to get across easily, and not have them get confused all the time. The more vowels
you have to care about, the more crowded the space inside your mouth gets. That makes it harder
to tell one vowel apart from its nearest neighbors.
To build up a nice vowel inventory, you’re going to want to use as much of the vowel
space as possible, and get those sounds spread out enough that you're not gonna make too
many mistakes. Languages usually end up using the space inside of your mouth in really
regular ways. The vast majority of languages have at least three vowels, and if
they only have three, they’ll usually be /i/, /u/, and /a/.
4.4% of the world’s languages, including Inuktitut and Pintupi use this system. Look
how nicely these use up the vowel space! Not a lot of chance for confusion here. If
the only vowels your language used were like, [ɪ], [ə] and [ʌ], or something? Think about
how much confusion people in that language would get. So the /i, /u/, /a/ system is
very good for telling sounds apart, but that's not really a lot of vowels to play with.
So the most common vowel setup cross-linguistically is the five-vowel system. We have a lot of
words we want to say, so a bit of variety is good! But again, you want to avoid having
too many vowels, because then you’re going to start getting some that sound really similar
to each other. The typical five-vowel system is usually something like /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/,
and /u/, and 30% of the world’s languages have this setup.
Languages like Spanish and Telugu have this five vowel system, and Japanese has about
the same, if you just swap out u for ɯ. Now, when you want to divvy up your phonemes
and create a whole bunch of words for your language to express, making the vowel inventory bigger
and bigger isn’t the only way. Some languages use tones or length or nasalization to extend
the number of vowels they have, and we’ll come back and look at these in a future episode.
But another method that languages use is to not keep your vocal tract set on one
vowel the whole time you’re making it. You can aim at more than one target over the
course of making your vowel, and score some easy extra sounds that way. These complex
vowels are known as diphthongs, and it’s easy to think of a few of them that we have in English.
These are things like the [aw] you get in Brown, or the [ej] you get in play. Try to
feel what your mouth is doing in Brown: your tongue is moving from the lowest, middle area
up to high and back, and your lips round. You don’t get a pure [a] or [ʊ], you get motion
from one to the other over the course of the vowel. So our loudest speech sounds are easy
enough to categorize. Just track where your tongue and lips are, and let
the air flow freely. It may not be as complicated a system as for consonants, but
ask any linguist, and they’ll tell you: it’s a sound one.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If my speech stream was unobstructed,
you learned that vowels are loud and clear sounds that happen when nothing gets in the
way of the air escaping from your vocal tract;
that they make perfect nuclei for syllables because they're so sonorous; that vowels differ
according to the shape of your mouth when you say them; and that there are a lot of
possible vowel sounds in the world, but languages most commonly use 5 because they have the
most balance with each other.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our production assistants are Georges Coulombe and Stephan
Hurtubise, our music and sound design is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
website, where we have some extra material on this topic. Check us out on Tumblr, Twitter
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And we’ll see you next Wednesday. Nahdaan pian!