Tenseness

In phonology, tenseness or tensing is the pronunciation of a vowel with narrower mouth width (often, with the tongue being raised) and usually with less centralization and longer duration compared with another vowel, thus causing a phonemic contrast between the two vowels. Contrast between vowels on the basis of tenseness is common in many languages, including English; for example, in most English dialects, [iː] (as in the word beet) is the tense counterpart to the lax /ɪ/ (as in bit), and /uː/ (as in kook) is the tense counterpart to the lax /ʊ/ (as in cook). The opposite quality of tenseness, in which a vowel is produced as relatively more widened (often lowered), centralized, and shortened is called laxness or laxing.

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 like 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 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 consonants.

In general, tense vowels are more close (and correspondingly have lower first formants) than their lax counterparts. Tense vowels are sometimes claimed to be articulated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels, but this varies, and in some languages, it is the lax vowels that are more advanced, or a single language may be inconsistent between front and back or high and mid vowels (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996, 302–4). The traditional definition, that tense vowels are produced with more "muscular tension" than lax vowels, has not been confirmed by phonetic experiments. Another hypothesis is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels. There are also linguists (Lass 1976, 1-39) who believe that there is no phonetic correlation to the tense–lax opposition.

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