Open-mid back unrounded vowel

Open-mid back unrounded vowel
ʌ
IPA number	314
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ʌ
Unicode (hex)	U+028C
X-SAMPA	V
Kirshenbaum	V
Braille
Image
Sound
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The open-mid back unrounded vowel, or low-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Acoustically it is an open-mid back-central unrounded vowel. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʌ⟩, graphically a rotated lowercase vee (called a turned V, though it was created as a small-capital ⟨ᴀ⟩ without the crossbar), and both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as either a wedge, a caret, or a hat. In transcriptions for some languages (including Danish and several dialects of English), this symbol is also used for the near-open central vowel.

The IPA prefers the terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. However, linguists are known to use the terms "high" and "low".

Features

IPA vowel chart
Front Near-​front Central Near-​back Back Close •iy •ɨʉ •ɯu •ɪʏ •ɪ̈ʊ̈ •ɯ̽ʊ •eø •ɘɵ •ɤo •e̞ø̞ •əɵ̞ •ɤ̞o̞ •ɛœ •ɜɞ •ʌɔ •æ •ɐɞ̞ •aɶ •äɒ̈ •ɑɒ Near-close Close-mid Mid Open-mid Near-open Open
Paired vowels are: unrounded • rounded
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• Its vowel height is open-mid, also known as low-mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between an open vowel (a low vowel) and a mid vowel.
• Its vowel backness is back, which means the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Note that unrounded back vowels tend to be centralized, which means that often they are in fact near-back.
• It is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
English	Cape Town	lot	[lʌ̟t]	'lot'	Near-back. It corresponds to a weakly rounded [ɒ̈] in all other South African dialects.
	Natal
	Cardiff	thought	[θʌ̟ːt]	'thought'	Near-back, for some speakers it may be rounded and closer. See English phonology
	Cockney	no	[nʌ̟ː]	'no, nah'	Near-back, often a diphthong. It corresponds to /əʊ̯/ in other dialects. See English phonology
	General South African		[nʌː]		May be a diphthong [ʌʊ̯] instead.
	Inland Northern American	gut	[ɡʌt]	'gut'	In most dialects, fronted to [ɜ], or fronted and lowered to [ɐ]. See English phonology and Northern Cities Vowel Shift
	Multicultural London
	Newfoundland
	Older Received Pronunciation
	Philadelphia
	Scottish
German	Chemnitz dialect	machen	[ˈmʌχɴ̩]	'to do'	Allophone of /ʌ, ʌː/ (which phonetically are central [ɜ, ɜː]) before and after /ŋ, kʰ, k, χ, ʁ/. Exact backness varies; it is most posterior before /χ, ʁ/. See Chemnitz dialect phonology
Haida		[qʰwʌʔáːj]		'the rock'	Allophone of /a/ (sometimes also /aː/) after uvular and epiglottal consonants.
Irish	Ulster dialect	ola	[ʌl̪ˠə]	'oil'	See Irish phonology
Kaingang		[ˈɾʌ]		'mark'	Varies between back [ʌ] and central [ɜ].
Korean		별/byeol	[pjʌl]	'star'	See Korean phonology
Lillooet					Retracted counterpart of /ə/.
Tamil					Nasalized. Phonetic realization of the sequence /am/, may be [õ] or [ã] instead. See Tamil phonology

Before World War II, the /ʌ/ of Received Pronunciation was phonetically close to a back vowel [ʌ]; this sound has since shifted forward towards [ɐ] (a near-open central unrounded vowel). Daniel Jones reports his speech (southern British), as having an advanced back vowel [ʌ̟] between his central /ə/ and back /ɔ/; however, he also reports that other southern speakers had a lower and even more advanced vowel approaching cardinal [a]. In American English varieties, e.g. the West and Midwest, and the urban South, the typical phonetic realization of the phoneme /ʌ/ is an open-mid central unrounded vowel [ɜ]. Truly backed variants of /ʌ/ that are phonetically [ʌ] can occur in Inland Northern American English, Newfoundland English, Philadelphia English, some African-American Englishes, and (old-fashioned) white Southern English in coastal plain and Piedmont areas. Despite this, the letter ⟨ʌ⟩ is still commonly used to indicate this phoneme, even in the more common varieties with central variants [ɐ] or [ɜ]. This may be due to both tradition as well as the fact that some other dialects retain the older pronunciation.