Open-mid back unrounded vowel
| Open-mid back unrounded vowel | |||
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| ʌ | |||
| IPA number | 314 | ||
| Encoding | |||
| Entity (decimal) | ʌ |
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| Unicode (hex) | U+028C | ||
| X-SAMPA | V |
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| Kirshenbaum | V |
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| Braille |  |
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| Paired vowels are: unrounded • rounded | |||||||||||||||||||
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IPA help • IPA key • chart •  chart with audio •
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The open-mid back unrounded vowel, or low-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Acoustically it is an open-mid back-central unrounded vowel. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʌ⟩, graphically a rotated lowercase "v" (called a turned V, though it was created as a small-capital ⟨ᴀ⟩ without the crossbar), and both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as either a wedge, a caret, or a hat. In transcriptions for English, this symbol is commonly used for the near-open central unrounded vowel, whereas in transcriptions for Danish, it is used for the (somewhat mid-centralized) open back rounded vowel.
The IPA prefers the terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. However, linguists are known to use the terms "high" and "low".
Before World War II, the /ʌ/ of Received Pronunciation was phonetically close to a back vowel [ʌ]; this sound has since shifted forward towards [ɐ] (a near-open central unrounded vowel). Daniel Jones reports his speech (southern British), as having an advanced back vowel [ʌ̟] between his central /ə/ and back /ɔ/; however, he also reports that other southern speakers had a lower and even more advanced vowel approaching cardinal [a]. In American English varieties, e.g. the West and Midwest, and the urban South, the typical phonetic realization of the phoneme /ʌ/ is an open-mid central [ɜ]. Truly backed variants of /ʌ/ that are phonetically [ʌ] can occur in Inland Northern American English, Newfoundland English, Philadelphia English, some African-American Englishes, and (old-fashioned) white Southern English in coastal plain and Piedmont areas. Despite this, the letter ⟨ʌ⟩ is still commonly used to indicate this phoneme, even in the more common varieties with central variants [ɐ] or [ɜ]. This may be due to both tradition as well as the fact that some other dialects retain the older pronunciation.
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