Open front unrounded vowel
The open central unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is a.
Features Its vowel height is open, which means the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Its vowel backness is front which means the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. There are no central open vowels because the tongue does not have as much flexibility in positioning as it does for the close vowels; as such the difference between an open front vowel and an open back vowel is equal to the difference between a close front vowel or a close back vowel and a close mid vowel. Its vowel roundedness is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.
Occurs in
All languages have some form of an unrounded open vowel. For languages that only have a single low vowel, the symbol for this vowel (a) is usually used because it is the only low vowel whose symbol is part of the basic Latin alphabet.
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