The Spanish vowels
Spanish has a very simple vowel system, comprising the following five vowels: [i], [e], [a], [o] and [u], as in piso ‘apartment’, peso ‘weight’, paso ‘step’, poso ‘sediment’ and puso ‘he/she put’.
In the production or articulation of a vowel, the body of the tongue arches upwards towards the roof of the
mouth, its tip remaining at rest just behind the lower front teeth. The distinctive quality of any given vowel is a function of the tongue’s highest point in the mouth, as measured on both the vertical and the horizontal axes. Thus vowels are classed as being either
high, mid or low, on the vertical axis, and as front, central or back, on the horizontal one.
Given this framework, the five vowels of Spanish can be
presented schematically as in Table 1 below.
Table 1 The Spanish vowels
| |
Front |
Central |
Back |
High |
[i] |
|
[u] |
Mid |
[e] |
|
[o] |
Low |
|
[a] |
|
As can be seen, [i] and [u] are produced
with the tongue relatively high in the mouth, [e] and [o] have an intermediate
tongue height and [a] is articulated with a fairly low or flat tongue. In terms of the
horizontal axis, the table implies that [i] and [e] are produced with the tongue in a relatively forward position, [a] is associated with an intermediate position, and [o] and [u] are
produced with the tongue arching backwards.
A vowel may also be specified in terms of whether the lips are
rounded or unrounded during its articulation. If you reflect on the lip position
for the vowel in the first syllable in each of piso, peso, paso, poso and puso, you should be able to notice that
[o] and [u] are articulated with rounded lips, while the other three vowels
have unrounded lips. As it turns out, the lip-rounding feature is not critical
to the classification of Spanish vowels, as each of the five vowel sounds can
be distinguished from the others in terms simply of its tongue height and its
position on the horizontal axis. Accordingly, in phonological descriptions of Spanish there is no need to refer to lip rounding.