Vokale

Vokale are speech sounds produced with an open or relatively unobstructed passage through the vocal tract, allowing air to flow without significant constriction. They typically serve as the syllabic nucleus and are among the most sonorous sounds in a language. Unlike most consonants, vowels rely on the configuration of the tongue and lips rather than on a strong articulatory contact.

Articulatory qualities of vowels are commonly described by tongue height (how high or low the tongue is in the mouth), tongue backness (whether the tongue is toward the front, center, or back of the mouth), and lip rounding. Vowels are also categorized by length in languages that contrast short and long vowels. In some languages, vowels may be nasalized, and in others they participate in vowel harmony or other phonological processes that affect surrounding sounds.

Vowels occur as phonemes, which distinguish meaning, and as allophones, which do not. A language may have a finite set of vowel phonemes (inventory) and may also feature more acoustically diverse pronunciations that do not change word meaning. Vowels can be monophthongs (steady vowel quality) or diphthongs (a rapid shift in quality within a single syllable). Some languages also have phonemic vowel length or reduced vowels in unstressed syllables.

In writing systems, vowels are typically represented by vowel letters or diacritics that indicate quality, length, or nasalization. Orthography can reflect historical vowel distinctions that may not mirror exact pronunciation in contemporary speech. German, for example, uses umlauted vowels to mark distinct front rounded qualities.

Overall, vowels are central to vowel inventories, syllable structure, and phonological systems across languages.