vocalic

Vocalic is an adjective used in phonetics and phonology to describe sounds that function as vowels or vowel-like segments. The term emphasizes the role of a sound in the syllable nucleus rather than its place of articulation. In many descriptions, vocalic sounds are those that form the core of a syllable, typically voiced and resonant with relatively open vocal tract configurations. This usage contrasts with consonantal, which characterizes sounds that contribute to the syllable's onset or coda and usually involve more constricted airflow.

Most commonly, vocalic sounds are vowels, such as the vowel qualities found in words like cat, bee, and boot. Some analyses also treat syllabic consonants as vocalic because they serve as the syllable’s nucleus, as in forms where an [n] or [l] acts as a syllable peak in certain dialects. In such frameworks, vocalic is a functional property rather than a strict segmental category. Glides or semivowels, while sonorant and vowel-like, are often described as consonantal in many phonological theories, though they can be characterized as vocally approximant in other analyses.

In orthography, the term vocalic can refer to letters that denote vowel sounds—primarily a, e, i, o, u, with sometimes y acting as a vowel. The concept is used across linguistic descriptions of syllable structure, vowel harmony, and phonological systems in languages around the world.