Vowel length

IPA vowel length
IPA number 503 or 504 or 505
Entity (decimal) &#720;&#721;&#774;
Unicode (hex) U+02D0 or U+02D1 or U+0306

In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may have arisen from one etymologically, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most other dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Finnish, Fijian, Japanese, Old English, Scottish Gaelic and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of dialects of British English and is said to be phonemic in a few other dialects, such as Australian English, South African English and New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike other varieties of Chinese.

Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically. Those that do usually distinguish between short vowels and long vowels. A very few languages distinguish three phonemic vowel lengths, such as Luiseño and Mixe. However, some languages with two vowel lengths also have words in which long vowels appear adjacent to other short or long vowels of the same type: Japanese hōō "phoenix" or Ancient Greek ἀάατος [a.áː.a.tos][1] "inviolable". Some languages that do not ordinarily have phonemic vowel length but permit vowel hiatus may similarly exhibit sequences of identical vowel phonemes that yield phonetically long vowels, such as Georgian გააადვილებ [ɡa.a.ad.vil.eb] "you will facilitate it".





Phonemic vowel length

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

Consider, for instance, the following example of minimal pairs in Italian:

Italian IPA Quality Etymology English
sentì /senˈti*/ short < lat. sentīre "He heard"
sentii /senˈtiː*/ long < lat. sentīre "I heard"

Long vowels may or may not be analyzed as separate phonemes. In Latin and Hungarian, long vowels are analyzed as separate phonemes from short vowels, which doubles the number of vowel phonemes.

Latin vowels
  Front Central Back
short long short long short long
Low   /a/ /aː/  


Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in kiKamba, there is [ko.ko.na], [kóó.ma̋], [ko.óma̋], [nétónubáné.éetɛ̂] "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".

Short and long vowels in English

Allophonic vowel length


Symbolic representation of the two allophonic rules:

/æ/ [æˑ] | _ [ +consonant ]
/ˈbæd/ [ˈbæˑd]
/æ/ [æ] | _ [ +consonant ]
/ˈbæt/ [ˈbæt]


Contrastive vowel length


[bɪd] bid vs [bɪːd] beard
[feɹi] ferry vs [feːɹi] fairy
[mænɪŋ] Manning the last name vs [mæːnɪŋ] manning

Traditional long and short vowels in English orthography

English vowels are sometimes split into "long" and "short" vowels along lines different from the linguistic differentiation. Traditionally, the vowels /eɪ iː aɪ oʊ juː/ (as in bait beat bite boat bute) 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.

However, the use of the terms "long" and "short" in describing these vowel values is actually linguistically incorrect, as the letters in these words, although the same letter may be used, actually represent different vowels, that is, they are pronounced in spoken English as different vowels.


Letter "Short" "Long" Example
A a /æ/ /eɪ/ mat / mate
E e /ɛ/ /iː/ pet / Pete
I i /ɪ/ /aɪ/ twin / twine
O o /ɒ/ /oʊ/ not / note
U u /ʌ/ /juː/ cub / cube

A mnemonic was that each vowel's long sound was its name. However, it is important to remember that the "a" in the word "mat" represents a different vowel sound than the "a" in "mate," it is not a long or short version of the same vowel sound. In this case, the terms "long" and "short" are incorrectly used to describe these vowel values.



Vowel length may often be traced to assimilation. In Australian English, the second element [ə] of a diphthong [eə] has assimilated to the preceding vowel, giving the pronunciation of bared as [beːd], creating a contrast with the short vowel in bed [bed].

Another common source is the vocalization of a consonant such as the voiced velar fricative [ɣ] or voiced palatal fricative, e.g. Finnish illative case, or even an approximant, as the English 'r'. A historically important example of this is the laryngeal theory, according to which many long vowels in the Indo-European languages were formed from short vowels followed by any one of several "laryngeal" sounds of Proto-Indo-European (conventionally written h1, h2 and h3). When a laryngeal followed a vowel, it was later lost in most Indo-European languages, and the preceding vowel became long. However, Proto-Indo-European possessed long vowels of other origin as well, usually as the result of older sound changes such as Szemerényi's law and Stang's law.

Vowel length may also have arisen as an allophonic quality of a single vowel phoneme, which may have then become split in two phonemes. For example, the Australian English phoneme /æː/ was created by the incomplete application of a rule extending /æ/ before certain voiced consonants, a phenomenon known as the bad–lad split. An alternative pathway to the phonemicization of allophonic vowel length is the shift of a vowel of a formerly different quality to become the short counterpart of a vowel pair; this is also exemplified by Australian English, where the contrast between /a/ (as in duck) and /aː/ (as in dark) was brought about by a lowering of earlier /ʌ/.

Estonian, of Finnic languages, exhibits a rare phenomenon, where allophonic length variation has become phonemic following the deletion of the suffixes causing the allophony. Estonian had already inherited two vowel lengths from Proto-Finnic, but a third one has been introduced by this phenomenon. For example, the Finnic imperative marker *-k caused the preceding vowels to be articulated shorter, and following the deletion of the marker, the allophonic length became phonemic, as shown in the example above.

Notations in the Latin alphabet



Estonian has a three-way phonemic contrast:

saada [saːːda] "to get" (overlong)
saada [saːda] "send!" (long)
sada [sada] "hundred" (short)


bead [biːd]
beat [biˑt]
bid [bɪˑd]
bit [bɪt]


Additional letters

Consistent use: byta /ˈbyːta/ 'to change' vs bytta /ˈbytːa/ 'tub' and koma /ˈkoːma/ 'coma' vs komma /ˈkomaː/ 'to come'

Other signs

No distinction


Notations in other writing systems



  4. Carlo Porta on the Italian Wikisource

