Central vowel

This article is about a class of vowel sounds. For the IPA diacritic used to mark a vowel as more central than a base symbol, see Centralization (phonetics).
IPA: Vowels
Front Central Back
Close
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open

Legend: unrounded • rounded

A central vowel (also called a mixed vowel in some older descriptions) is a vowel articulated with the tongue in a position intermediate between that of a front vowel and a back vowel.

The term central refers to an intermediate value on the backness dimension and is not synonymous with mid, which refers to an intermediate value on the height dimension.

In the PHOIBLE 2.0 database (3,020 phoneme inventories), the most frequently reported central-vowel phonemes with dedicated IPA letters are [ə] and [ɨ], occurring in 675 (22%) and 491 (16%) inventories respectively. Other dedicated central-vowel letters such as [ʉ], [ɵ], [ɜ], and [ɞ] are much less common.

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