backvokaalit

Backvokaalit (back vowels) are vowels articulated with the tongue body positioned toward the back of the mouth. They are defined in relation to front vowels, with central vowels lying between front and back. Backness is a primary dimension of vowel articulation, often combined with tongue height (high, mid, low) and lip rounding.

The defining property of back vowels is tongue retreat. This back position influences both articulation and acoustics, producing characteristic formant patterns. While rounding is common for many back vowels, it is not universal; some languages include back vowels that are unrounded, such as Turkish /ɯ/.

Commonly attested back vowels across languages include high back rounded [u], high back unrounded [ɯ], mid back rounded [o], mid back unrounded [ɔ], open back [ɑ], and open back rounded [ɒ]. The exact inventory varies by language, and some languages have more or fewer back vowels or distinguish additional close-mid or open-mid back vowels.

Back vowels contrast with front vowels and, in many languages, with central vowels as part of a continuous backness scale. In several languages, backness interacts with other phonological processes. For example, vowel harmony systems in languages such as Turkish and Kazakh use backness as a governing feature for suffix vowels. In Finnish, a related front–back distinction influences vowel harmony in a broader sense, with suffix vowels reflecting the stem’s backness.

Phonetically, back vowels typically exhibit relatively low F2 values in spectrograms, reflecting the tongue's posterior position, though exact acoustic realizations vary by height, rounding, and dialect. Overall, backvokaalit constitute a core class of vowel sounds defined by tongue retreat, with diverse realizations and important roles in phonological systems worldwide.