The Vowel Space

To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription. 0:00 Vowels are not discrete 1:50 Vowels and colour 3:40 Resonating cavities and formants 5:40 Synthesizing vowels with Praat Vowel Editor 6:33 Vowels and basic colour terms 8:24 Early phoneticians and the tongue space 9:36 The tongue quadrilateral and MRI 9:54 Daniel Jones & Cardinal Vowels 11:00 The real vowel space explains 14:07 Inconsistent vowel demos 15:07 Consistent vowels with technology 17:05 A 3D vowel space For more detail, see my published article: Lindsey, G. (2017) ’Charting the vowel space’, in G. Lindsey & A. Nevins (eds.) Sonic Signatures, John Benjamins, pp 134-144 or see my blog article, which contains both clickable charts Standalone clickable IPA chart: Praat: MRI vowel demos: Peter’ Ladefoged’s Vowels and Consonants: MRI clip by MART Production: Articulography clip, University of Tartu Phonetics Lab: Pharyngometer clip: Cardinal Vowel charts: This video was sponsored by Brilliant.