Roundedness
how the lips form during the articulation of a vowel
In phonetics, vowel roundedness is the rounding of the lips, or lack thereof, during the articulation of a vowel. It is the degree and kind of labialization of a vowel. In the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart, rounded vowels are the ones that appear on the right in each bulleted pair of letters, and the corresponding unrounded vowels are the ones on the left, with [a] (when central) and the unpaired vowels [ɐ] and [ə] being neutral or unspecified. In most dialects of English, the vowel with the greatest degree of rounding is /u/, as in the word too, though some languages have significantly greater rounding of their /u/ vowel.
The contrary articulation to rounded is spread lips, in which the corners of the mouth are pulled away from each other but the lips remain fairly close together. In English, as in most languages, the vowel with the greatest lip-spreading is /i/, as in the word see.
When a (back) rounded vowel is pronounced, the lips form a circular opening that is typically wider or smaller according to how open or close the vowel is, while unrounded vowels are pronounced with the lips either spread or relaxed (neutral between spread and rounded). The degree of lip-spreading also correlates with the height of the vowel. In most languages, front vowels are spread and back vowels rounded; acoustically, this helps distinguish back vowels from front. However, some languages, such as French and German, contrast rounded and unrounded front vowels, and others, like Vietnamese, contrast rounded and unrounded back vowels.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roundedness” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.