Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels.
On one hand, many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically, meaning that vowel length alone does not change the meanings of words. However, the amount of time a vowel is uttered can change based on factors such as the phonetic characteristics of the sounds around it: the phonetic environment. An example is that vowels tend to be pronounced longer before a voiced consonant and shorter before a voiceless consonant in the standard accents of American and British English.
On the other hand, vowel length is indeed an important phonemic factor in certain languages, meaning vowel length can change word-meanings, for example in Arabic, Czech, Dravidian languages, some Finno-Ugric languages, Japanese, Kyrgyz, Samoan, and Xhosa. Some languages in the past likely had the distinction even though their modern descendants do not, with an example being Latin versus its descendent Romance languages like Spanish and French. Length also plays a lesser phonetic role in Cantonese, unlike in other varieties of Chinese, which do not have phonemic vowel length distinctions.
Whether vowel length alone changes word-meanings in English depends on the particular dialect; it is able to do so in a few non-rhotic dialects, such as Australian English, Lunenburg English, New Zealand English, South African English, and possibly some English of Southern England. For instance, vowel length can distinguish park from puck in Australian and New Zealand English, or bared from bed in any of these dialects. Phonemic vowel length perhaps marginally occurs in a few rhotic dialects too, such as Scottish English and Northern Irish English.
Languages that do distinguish vowel length phonemically usually only distinguish between short vowels and long vowels. Very few languages distinguish three phonemic vowel lengths; some that do so are Estonian, Luiseño, and Mixe. However, languages with two vowel lengths may permit words in which two adjacent vowels are of the same quality: Japanese ほうおう,, "phoenix", or Ancient Greek ἀάατος, "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, , "you will facilitate it".
Related features
is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels are always in stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length, which gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long vowel, which is a short vowel found in a syllable immediately preceded by a stressed short vowel: i-so.Among the languages with distinctive vowel length, there are some in which it may occur only in stressed syllables, such as in Alemannic German, Scottish Gaelic and Egyptian Arabic. In languages such as Czech, Finnish, some Irish dialects and Classical Latin, vowel length is distinctive also in unstressed syllables.
In some languages, vowel length is sometimes better analyzed as a sequence of two identical vowels. In Finnic languages, such as Finnish, the simplest example follows from consonant gradation: haka → haan. In some cases, it is caused by a following chroneme, which is etymologically a consonant: jää "ice" ← Proto-Uralic *jäŋe. In non-initial syllables, it is ambiguous if long vowels are vowel clusters; poems written in the Kalevala meter often syllabicate between the vowels, and an intervocalic -h- is seen in that and some modern dialects. Morphological treatment of diphthongs is essentially similar to long vowels. Some old Finnish long vowels have developed into diphthongs, but successive layers of borrowing have introduced the same long vowels again so the diphthong and the long vowel now again contrast.
In Japanese, most long vowels are the results of the phonetic change of diphthongs; au and ou became ō, iu became yū, eu became yō, and now ei is becoming ē. The change also occurred after the loss of intervocalic phoneme. For example, modern Kyōto has undergone a shift:. Another example is shōnen :.
Phonemic vowel length
As noted above, only a relatively few of the world's languages make a phonemic distinction between long and short vowels. Some families have many such languages, examples being the Dravidian languages and the Finno-Ugric languages. Other languages have fewer relatives with vowel length, including Arabic, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic. There are also older languages such as Ancient Greek, Biblical Hebrew, and Latin which have phonemic vowel length but no descendants that preserve it.In Latin and Hungarian, some long vowels are analyzed as separate phonemes from short vowels:
Vowel length contrasts with more than two phonemic levels are rare, and several hypothesized cases of three-level vowel length can be analysed without postulating this typologically unusual configuration. Estonian has three distinctive lengths, but the third is suprasegmental, as it has developed from the allophonic variation caused by now-deleted grammatical markers. For example, half-long 'aa' in saada comes from the agglutination *saa+tta+k */sɑːtˑɑk/ "send +", and the overlong 'aa' in saada comes from *saa+dak "get+". As for languages that have three lengths, independent of vowel quality or syllable structure, these include Dinka, Mixe, Yavapai and Wichita. An example from Mixe is "guava", "spider", "knot". In Dinka the longest vowels are three moras long, and so are best analyzed as overlong e.g..
Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in Kikamba, there is,,, "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".
By language
In English
Contrastive vowel length
In many varieties of English, vowels contrast with each other both in length and in quality, and descriptions differ in the relative importance given to these two features. Some descriptions of Received Pronunciation and more widely some descriptions of English phonology group all non-diphthongal vowels into the categories "long" and "short", convenient terms for grouping the many vowels of English. Daniel Jones proposed that phonetically similar pairs of long and short vowels could be grouped into single phonemes, distinguished by the presence or absence of phonological length. The usual long-short pairings for RP are /iː + ɪ/, /ɑː + æ/, /ɜ: + ə/, /ɔː + ɒ/, /u + ʊ/, but Jones omits /ɑː + æ/. This approach is not found in present-day descriptions of English. Vowels show allophonic variation in length and also in other features according to the context in which they occur. The terms tense and lax are alternative terms that do not directly refer to length.In Australian English, there is contrastive vowel length in closed syllables between long and short and. The following are minimal pairs of length:
Allophonic vowel length
In most varieties of English, for instance Received Pronunciation and General American, there is allophonic variation in vowel length depending on the value of the consonant that follows it: vowels are shorter before voiceless consonants and are longer when they come before voiced consonants. Thus, the vowel in bad is longer than the vowel in bat. Also compare neat with need. The vowel sound in "beat" is generally pronounced for about 190 milliseconds, but the same vowel in "bead" lasts 350 milliseconds in normal speech, the voiced final consonant influencing vowel length.Cockney English features short and long varieties of the closing diphthong. The short corresponds to RP in morphologically closed syllables, whereas the long corresponds to the non-prevocalic sequence . The following are minimal pairs of length:
The difference is lost in running speech, so that fault falls together with fort and fought as or. The contrast between the two diphthongs is phonetic rather than phonemic, as the can be restored in formal speech: etc., which suggests that the underlying form of is . Furthermore, a vocalized word-final is often restored before a word-initial vowel, so that fall out is somewhat more likely to contain the lateral than fall. The distinction between and exists only word-internally before consonants other than intervocalic. In the morpheme-final position only occurs, so that all is always distinct from or. Before the intervocalic is the banned diphthong, though here either of the vowels can occur, depending on morphology.
In Cockney, the main difference between and, and as well as and is length, not quality, so that his, merry and Polly differ from here's, Mary and poorly mainly in length. In broad Cockney, the contrast between and is also mainly one of length; compare hat with out .
"Long" and "short" vowel letters in spelling and the classroom teaching of reading
In the teaching of English, vowels are commonly said to have a "short" and a "long" version. The terms "short" and "long" are not accurate from a linguistic point of view—at least in the case of Modern English—as the vowels are not actually short and long versions of the same sound, and many of the "long vowels" are actually diphthongs; the terminology is a historical holdover due to their arising from proper vowel length in Middle English. The phonetic values of these vowels are shown in the table below.| letter | "short" | "long" | examples |
| a | mat / mate | ||
| e | pet / Pete | ||
| i | twin / twine | ||
| o | not / note | ||
| oo | wood / wooed | ||
| u | cub / cube |
In a phonetic transcription system that uses pronunciation respelling, "long" and "short" vowel letters are written in a form a normal reader of the language would unambiguously know how to pronounce; eg. "ay" or "ey" are used for , and "ee" or "iy" are used for . Whilst many dictionaries use pronunciation respelling, other dictionaries, notably the Merriam-Webster, use a macron over a vowel to indicate a long vowel; for example, ⟨ā⟩ is be used to represent the IPA sound, or a breve to indicate a short vowel, as is used in the American Heritage Dictionary. See Pronunciation respelling for English for a comprehensive comparative table of pronunciation respelling systems for English.