Cardinal vowels
standardised set of speech sounds
Cardinal vowels (sometimes abbreviated as CVs) are a set of reference vowels used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages. They are classified depending on the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth, how far forward or back is the highest point of the tongue, and the position of the lips (rounded or unrounded).
A cardinal vowel is a vowel sound produced when the tongue is in an extreme position, either front or back, high or low. The current system was formulated by Daniel Jones in the early 20th century, though the idea goes back to earlier phoneticians, notably Alexander John Ellis and Alexander Melville Bell.
Description
Definitions
Four of the cardinal vowels—[i, a, ɑ, u]—have articulatory definitions as fixed reference points:
[i] is produced with the tongue as close as possible to the hard palate without producing frication, with spread (unrounded) lips.
[u] is produced with the tongue as close as possible to the soft palate (velum) without producing frication, with protruded (rounded) lips.
[ɑ] is produced with tongue as close as possible to the pharynx without producing frication, with neutral (unrounded) lips.
[a] is produced with the tongue as forward as possible while the mouth is as open as possible (that is, approximately the frontness of [i] combined with the openness of [ɑ]), with neutral (unrounded) lips.
The other vowels are 'auditorily equidistant' between these four 'corner vowels', at four degrees of aperture or 'height': close (high tongue position), close-mid, open-mid, and open (low tongue position).
Primary cardinal vowels
The four degrees of aperture combined with the front–back distinction define eight reference points on a mixture of articulatory and auditory criteria.
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