Discuss cardinal vowels showing their positions in English.

Cardinal Vowels with Examples in English

Have you ever wondered how many types of sounds we humans can produce while speaking? Countless! As you might already know that there are many types of vowel sounds are produced when the tongue is in an extreme position – front or back, high or low. And to study the vowel sounds, we have Cardinal Vowels.

The Cardinal Vowel system allows us to depict the series of humanly possible vowel sounds.

What are Cardinal Vowels?

Cardinal vowels are a group of reference vowels used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages.  They are language independent and are used to mark the relationship between vowels of different languages. In simple words, Cardinal vowels are not vowels of any particular language, but a measuring system.

Cardinal Vowels are classified into Primary and Secondary based on the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth. Let us understand them briefly.

Examples of Primary Cardinal Vowels

Try to comprehend the production of different rounded vowel sounds with the table below.    

Mouth position	Tongue in Front	Tongue in Back
Close	i	u
Close-mid	e	o
Open-mid	ɛ	ɔ
Open	a	ɑ

Here, i is produced with the most front, closest position of the tongue which does not produce audible friction, whereas ɑ is produced with the most back and most open possible tongue position, again without audible friction.

Examples of Secondary Cardinal Vowels

The Secondary ones are different in terms of lip posture as it gets reversed here.

Mouth position	Tongue in Front	Tongue in Back
Close	y	ɯ
Close-mid	ø	ɤ
Open-mid	œ	ʌ
Open	Œ	ɒ

 

For example, primary vowel i is close, front, unrounded and so secondary vowel y is close, front and rounded. To take another example, vowel u is close, back, rounded whereas vowel ɯ is close, back, unrounded.

Daniel Jones was an English Phonetician who developed the Cardinal Vowel System in the early 20^th century.

Diagram showing cardinal vowels position in the following illustration: