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In phonology, tenseness or tensing is, most generally, the pronunciation of a sound with greater muscular effort or constriction than is typical.Matthews, Peter Hugoe (2014). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford University PRess. p. 403. More specifically, tenseness is the pronunciation of a vowel with less centralization (i.e. either more front vowel or more back vowel), longer Vowel length, and narrower mouth width (with the tongue being perhaps more raised) compared with another vowel.Halle, Morris (1977). "Tenseness, Vowel Shift, and the Phonology of the Back Vowels in Modern English." Linguistic Inquiry 8.4. p. 611. The opposite quality to tenseness is known as laxness or laxing: the pronunciation of a vowel with relatively more centralization, shorter duration, and more widening (perhaps even lowering).
Contrasts between two vowels on the basis of tenseness, and even phonemic contrasts, are common in many languages, including English language. For example, in most English dialects, beet and bit are contrasted by the vowel sound being tense in the first word but not the second; i.e., (as in beet) is the tense counterpart to the lax (as in bit); the same is true of (as in kook) versus (as in cook). Unlike most distinctive features, the feature tense can be interpreted only relatively, often with a perception of greater tension or pressure in the mouth, which, in a language such as English, contrasts between two corresponding vowel types: a tense vowel and a lax vowel. An example in Vietnamese is the letters ă and â representing lax vowels, and the letters a and ơ representing the corresponding tense vowels. Some languages like Spanish language are often considered as having only tense vowels, but since the quality of tenseness is not a phonemic feature in this language, it cannot be applied to describe its vowels in any meaningful way. The term has also occasionally been used to describe contrasts in .
In many Germanic languages, such as RP English, and Standard German tense vowels are longer in duration than lax vowels, but in Scots language, Scottish English, General American English, and Icelandic, there is no such correlation. The standard variety of Yiddish lacks a vowel length distinction entirely.
Germanic languages prefer tense vowels in open syllables (so-called ) and lax vowels in closed syllables (so-called ).
In Ewe language, and are articulated with a strong articulation, and , to better distinguish them from weaker and .
In some dialects of Irish language and Scottish Gaelic, there is a contrast between and . Again, the former set have sometimes been described as lax and the latter set as tense. It is not clear what phonetic characteristics other than greater duration would then be associated with tenseness.
Some researchers have argued that the contrast in German language, traditionally described as voice ( vs. ), is in fact better analyzed as tenseness since the latter set is voiceless in Southern German. German linguists call the distinction fortis and lenis rather than tense and lax. Tenseness is especially used to explain of the Alemannic German dialects because they have two series of them that are identically voiceless and unaspirated. However, it is debated whether the distinction is really a result of different muscular tension and not of gemination.
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