Open front rounded vowel

Vowels

v • d • e

See also: IPA, Consonants

	Front	Near- front	Central	Near- back	Back
Close	i · y ɨ · ʉ ɯ · u ɪ · ʏ ɪ̈ · ʊ̈ ʊ e · ø ɘ · ɵ ɤ · o ə ɛ · œ ɜ · ɞ ʌ · ɔ æ ɐ a · ɶ ɑ · ɒ
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid
Open-mid
Near-open
Open

Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents
a rounded vowel. Vowel length is indicated by appending ː.

IPA – number	312
IPA – text	ɶ
IPA – image
Entity	ɶ
X-SAMPA	&
Kirshenbaum	a.
Sound sample (help·info)

The open front rounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, not confirmed to be phonemic in any spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ɶ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is &. The symbol ɶ is a small capital Œ. Note that œ, the lowercase version of the ligature, is used for the open-mid front rounded vowel.

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.
• The lips are rounded.

Occurrence

[ɶ] is not confirmed to exist as a phoneme in any language. A phoneme generally transcribed by this symbol is reported from the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian German. It is the rounded equivalent of /æ/, not of open /a/, and so would be more narrowly transcribed as [œ̞] or [ɶ̝]. However, the vowel formants place Amstetten /æ/ and /œ/ one third of the way between /a/ and /i/, matching the IPA definition for open-mid vowels.