Legend: unrounded • rounded
A close-mid vowel (also mid-close vowel, high-mid vowel, mid-high vowel or half-close vowel) is any in a class of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned one third of the way from a close vowel to an open vowel.[1]
Partial list
The close-mid vowels that have dedicated symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
- close-mid front unrounded vowel [e]
- close-mid front rounded vowel [ø]
- close-mid central unrounded vowel [ɘ] (older publications may use ⟨ë⟩)
- close-mid central rounded vowel [ɵ] (older publications may use ⟨ö⟩)
- close-mid back unrounded vowel [ɤ]
- close-mid back rounded vowel [o]
Other close-mid vowels can be indicated with diacritics of relative articulation applied to letters for neighboring vowels.