Vowel length

In linguistics, vowel length is the duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Finnish. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Czech, Fijian, Finnish, Japanese, Hawaiian, Classical Latin, Old English, Samoan, and Thai. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of English dialects, and is said to be phonemic in a few dialects, such Australian English and New Zealand English.

Related Topics:
Linguistics - Duration - Vowel - Chroneme - English - Phonemic - Czech - Fijian - Finnish - Japanese - Hawaiian - Classical Latin - Old English - Samoan - Thai - Australian English - New Zealand English

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Most languages do not distinguish vowel length, and for those that do, usually the only distinction is between short vowels and long vowels. There are very few languages that distinguish three vowel lengths, for instance Mixe. Some languages, such as Finnish, Estonian and Japanese also have words where long vowels are immediately followed by more vowels, e.g. Japanese h?? "phoenix" or Estonian jäääärne "edge of the ice".

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