Front rounded vowel

IPA: Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i y	ɨ ʉ	ɯ u
Near-close	ɪ ʏ		ʊ
Close-mid	e ø	ɘ ɵ	ɤ o
Mid	e̞ ø̞	ə	ɤ̞ o̞
Open-mid	ɛ œ	ɜ ɞ	ʌ ɔ
Near-open	æ	ɐ
Open	a ɶ	ä	ɑ ɒ

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Legend: unrounded • rounded

A front rounded vowel is a particular type of vowel that is both front and rounded.

The front rounded vowels defined by the IPA include:

• [y], a close front rounded vowel (or "high front rounded vowel")
• [ʏ], a near-close front rounded vowel (or "near-high ...")
• [ø], a close-mid front rounded vowel (or "high-mid ...")
• [ø̞], a mid front rounded vowel
• [œ], an open-mid front rounded vowel (or "low-mid ...")
• [ɶ], an open front rounded vowel (or "low ...")

Front rounded vowels are cross-linguistically relatively uncommon, but occur in a number of well-known languages, including French, German, Turkish and Chinese.

The high vowel [y] is the most common, while the low vowel [ɶ] is extremely rare. This is consistent with the general correlation between rounding and vowel height.

Language families in which front-rounded vowels are common are:

• Sino-Tibetan languages (e.g. Standard Chinese, Standard Tibetan)
• Various Indo-European languages:
  • Germanic languages
  • Gallo-Romance languages, a subset of the Romance languages (e.g. French, Occitan, Lombard)
  • Albanian
  • Ancient Greek
• Turkic languages (e.g. Turkish, Azerbaijani)
• Mongolic languages
• Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian)