Vokaalid

Vokaalid, or vowels, are a class of speech sounds produced with relatively little constriction in the vocal tract, allowing a continuous spectrum of resonances. They typically form the core of syllables, serving as the nucleus around which consonants cluster. Vowels are generally voiced, though certain languages may have phonemic contrasts involving voiceless vowels or special allophonic patterns.

Vowels are commonly described by articulatory features such as height (how high the tongue is in the mouth: high, mid, low), backness (tongue position along the front–back axis: front, central, back), and lip rounding (rounded or unrounded). Additional dimensions include tenseness (lax vs tense) and length (short vs long), which in many languages produce distinct phonemic contrasts. Some languages also exhibit vowel harmony, where the quality of vowels in affixes depends on the root vowel.

Vowel inventories vary widely across languages. Some languages have only a few vowels, while others possess a large set, including near-close, central, and rounded varieties. Vowels can be monophthongs, maintaining a single quality, or diphthongs, ending in a glide that changes the vowel’s quality within a syllable. Orthography often represents vowels with letters, sometimes supplemented by diacritics to indicate length, nasalization, rounding, or quality differences.

In Estonian linguistics, the term vokaalid denotes vowels. The study of vokaalid includes their articulation, phonological behavior, and roles in syllable structure and prosody.