The Vowels Of American English Page 6
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15Which vowels are in each group? The vowel quadrant below shows the tense vowels in red
and the lax vowels in blue. If you look at the dotted line that divides the two groups, you
can see that the tense vowels are mostly toward the outside edges of the quadrant,
indicating that they have more extreme tongue positions, and the tongue has to stretch or
push a bit farther to get there. The lax vowels are closer to the middle of the quadrant; the
tongue is not pushing out toward the extreme edges of the mouth, so in a sense, it is more
relaxed.
Another difference between tense and lax vowels in in the positions in which they can be
used in words. Tense vowels can occur both in closed syllables (those that end in a
consonant sound, like meet or goal) and open syllables (those that do not have a
consonant sound after the vowel, like me or go.) Lax vowels can occur in closed syllables,
but not in stressed, open syllables. This means that we often find words that end in tense
vowels: Me, day, shoe, show, saw, happy, today, subdue, etc. However, we never find
words that end in lax vowels. That is, English doesn’t have words like /mɪ/, /dɛ/, /ʃæ/, or
/bᴜ/.
Simple vowels, glided vowels, and diphthongs
Finally, we can classify vowels based on how much tongue movement there is during the
vowel. For example, when we say /æ/ as in bad, the tongue position and quality of the
vowel stay constant throughout the sound, even if we continue to say the vowel for a long
time. We call this type of vowel a simple vowel or a pure vowel.
Other vowels have a small change in tongue position from the beginning to the end. For
example, when we say /ey/ as in day, our tongue moves just a bit, from the position of /ɛ/
to the position of /iy/. We can call vowels of this type glided vowels
or vowels with
glides. (In some textbooks, glided vowels aren’t considered a separate group. Some authors
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