sevenvowel

Sevenvowel is a term used in phonology to denote a language's vowel inventory comprising seven distinct phonemic vowels. The label is commonly used in typological comparison to describe languages with more vowels than the widespread five-vowel systems but fewer than inventories with eight or more vowels.

A seven-vowel system typically spans a range of tongue heights from high to low and a range of backness from front to back, with some inventories also making central vowels part of the set. Rounding contrasts may be present on front or back vowels, depending on the language. Because sevenvowel is a count-based descriptor, the exact phonetic values vary across languages.

In linguistic research, seven-vowel inventories are analyzed to understand vowel harmony, allophony, syllable structure, and lexical contrast. They are modeled using standard phonological representations and may interact with length, stress, or phonotactic constraints. Cross-linguistic surveys document seven-vowel systems across multiple language families to illustrate typological variation.

Orthographies for languages with seven vowels usually map each phonemic vowel to a dedicated grapheme; however, diacritics or digraphs are sometimes used to capture distinctions such as rounding or central vowels.

See also: vowel inventory, phoneme, phonology, orthography.