CVCVCV

CVCVCV is a symbolic representation used in linguistics to describe a sequence of phonemes in which consonants and vowels alternate, yielding a six-phoneme string that begins with a consonant and ends with a vowel. The pattern is commonly used to illustrate open syllable configurations where each syllable is CV, and a word can be analyzed as three adjacent CV syllables (CV-CV-CV).

In phonological analysis, CVCVCV serves as a generic template rather than a fixed phonetic form. Real languages impose constraints on which consonants may start or end syllables and which vowels are allowed in nuclei. As a result, a surface realization that follows the CVCVCV pattern may feature different vowels or allow epenthetic adjustments to satisfy language-specific phonotactics. The pattern is therefore best understood as a structural description rather than a rigid phonetic sequence.

Example and interpretation: the English word banana can be analyzed in phonemic form as b-ə-n-æ-n-ə, a C-V-C-V-C-V sequence. This illustrates how a single word can exhibit the CVCVCV pattern across its phonemes while the actual syllable boundaries align with CV units.

Variations exist across languages, such as the presence of consonant clusters, vowel harmony, or vowel reduction, all of which can modify how a CVCVCV template is realized in speech. In computational linguistics and poetry analysis, CVCVCV is used as a simple abstraction for modeling alternations and rhyming patterns.

See also: syllable structure, phonotactics, phoneme.