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In phonetics, vowel roundedness is the amount of rounding in the during the articulation of a vowel. It is labialization of a vowel. When a rounded vowel is pronounced, the lips form a circular opening, and unrounded vowels are pronounced with the lips relaxed. In most languages, tend to be unrounded, and tend to be rounded. However, some languages, such as French language, German language and Icelandic, distinguish rounded and unrounded front vowels of the same vowel height (degree of openness), and Vietnamese distinguishes rounded and unrounded back vowels of the same height. Alekano language has only unrounded vowels.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart, rounded vowels are the ones that appear on the right in each pair of vowels. There are also diacritics, and , to indicate greater and lesser degrees of rounding, respectively. Thus has less rounding than cardinal , and has more (closer to the rounding of cardinal ). These diacritics can also be used with unrounded vowels: is more spread than cardinal , and is less spread than cardinal .'Further report on the 1989 Kiel Convention', Journal of the International Phonetic Association 20:2 (December 1990), p. 23.
There are no dedicated IPA diacritics to represent the distinction, but the superscript IPA letter or can be used for compressionE.g. in ; the IPA Handbook recommends that "might be used" for "a secondary reduction of the lip opening accompanied by neither protrusion nor velar constriction". and for protrusion. Compressed vowels may be pronounced either with the corners of the mouth drawn in, by some definitions rounded, or with the corners spread and, by the same definitions, unrounded. The distinction may be transcribed vs (or vs ).Occasionally other symbols may be used, such as protruded () and compressed (). To avoid the implication that the superscript represents an off-glide, it might be placed above the base letter: . Ladefoged & Maddieson use old IPA for protrusion (w-like labialization without velarization), while use w for protrusion (e.g. ) and a reversed w for compression (e.g. ). This recalls an old IPA convention of rounding an unrounded vowel letter like i with a subscript omega, and unrounding a rounded letter like u with a turned omega (Jespersen & Pedersen 1926: 19).
The distinction between protruded and compressed holds for the and as well as labialization. In Akan language, for example, the is compressed, as are labio-palatalized consonants as in Twi "Twi" and adwuma "work", whereas and simply labialized consonants are protruded. In Japanese, the is compressed rather than protruded, paralleling the Japanese . The distinction applies marginally to other consonants. In Kukuya language, the sole language reported to have a phonemic , the labiodental sound is "accompanied by strong protrusion of both lips", whereas the found as an allophone of before in languages such as English is not protruded, as the lip contacts the teeth along its upper or outer edge. Also, in at least one account of speech acquisition, a child's pronunciation of clown involves a lateral with the upper teeth contacting the upper-outer edge of the lip, but in crown, a non-lateral is pronounced with the teeth contacting the inner surface of the protruded lower lip.
Some vowels transcribed with rounded IPA letters may not be rounded at all. An example is , the vowel of lot, which in Received Pronunciation has very little if any rounding of the lips. The "throaty" sound of the vowel is instead accomplished with sulcalization, a furrowing of the back of the tongue also found in , the vowel of nurse.
It is possible to mimic the acoustic effect of rounded vowels by narrowing the cheeks, so-called "cheek rounding", which is inherent in back protruded (but not front compressed) vowels. The technique is used by ventriloquists to mask the visible rounding of back vowels like . It is not clear if it is used by languages with rounded vowels that do not use visible rounding.
| +Unrounded, compressed and protruded vowels ! ! Front ! Near-front ! Central ! Near-back ! Back |
Of the open-mid vowels, occurs in Swedish and Norwegian. Central and back have not been reported to occur in any language.
In many languages, such effects are minor phonetic detail, but in others, they become significant. For example, in Standard Chinese, the vowel is pronounced after labial consonants, an allophonic effect that is so important that it is encoded in pinyin transliteration: alveolar () 'many' vs. labial () 'wave'. In Vietnamese, the opposite assimilation takes place: velar codas and are pronounced as labialized and or even labial-velar and , after the rounded vowels and .
In the Northwest Caucasian languages of the Caucasus and the Sepik languages of Papua New Guinea, historically rounded vowels have become unrounded, with the rounding being taken up by the consonant. Thus, Sepik and are phonemically and . In the extinct Ubykh phonology, and were phonemically and .
A few ancient Indo-European languages like Latin had labialized velar consonants.
| + , and in some dialects ! rowspan="2" | Accent ! colspan="3" | Vowel ! rowspan="2" | Notes |
In addition, contemporary Standard Southern British English as well as Western Pennsylvania English contrast with mostly by rounding. An example of a minimal pairs is nut vs. not. The vowels are open-mid in the former dialect and open in the latter. In Western Pennsylvania English, the class also includes the class (see cot-caught merger) and the one (see father-bother merger). In addition, may be longer than due to its being a free vowel: . In SSBE, these are all distinct and is a checked vowel. In Scottish English, the two vowels tend to be realized as and , respectively. The latter often includes the class as the cot-caught merger is common in Scotland. If is distinct, it is realized as , whereas is lowered to or raised to . This means that while nought contrasts with nut by rounding, not may have a different vowel . In addition, all three vowels are short in Scotland (see Scottish vowel length rule), unless followed by a voiced fricative where (and , if they are merged) is long, as in England.
| + , and in some dialects ! rowspan="2" | Accent ! colspan="3" | Vowel ! rowspan="2" | Notes |
General South African English is unique among accents of English in that it can feature up to three front rounded vowels, with two of them having unrounded counterparts.
| + Long front vowels in General SAE ! rowspan="2" | Height ! colspan="2" | Unr. vowel ! colspan="2" | Rnd. vowel ! rowspan="2" | Notes |
The potential contrast between the close-mid and the open-mid is hard to perceive by outsiders, making utterances such as the total onslaught sound almost like the turtle onslaught .
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