Vokalen

Vokalen is a term used in linguistics to refer to the vowel sounds of a language—the vocalic nuclei of syllables. Vowels are produced with a relatively open vocal tract and without a significant constriction of the airflow, unlike most consonants. They are typically voiced and serve as the core around which syllables are built, often carrying the primary prosodic information of a word.

Vowels are described by several interacting features. Height refers to the vertical position of the tongue (high, mid, low); backness to the horizontal position (front, central, back); and rounding to the shape of the lips (rounded or unrounded). Some languages also distinguish tense and lax vowels, length (short vs long), nasalization, or creaky voice. Vowel harmony systems align the vowels across words or affixes with shared features.

Vowel inventories vary widely across languages. A language may have as few as five distinct vowels in its phonemic system or many more, including front and back rounded vowels, central vowels, and diphthongs. In many languages, vowels interact with consonants in processes such as vowel harmony, vowel reduction in unstressed syllables, and vowel shifts over time.

Orthography often uses letters to represent vowels, sometimes with diacritics or digraphs to indicate length, nasalization, or quality differences. In phonetics and phonology, vowels are commonly described using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols. Historical sound changes, such as the Great Vowel Shift in English, have shaped modern vowel systems.