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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Vowels beside dots are: 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 Mandarin.

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:

Some Sino-Tibetan languages:
- Chinese varieties (e.g. Mandarin including Standard Chinese; Cantonese; Shanghainese)
- Standard Tibetan
Various Indo-European languages:
- Modern Germanic languages (with the notable exceptions of the largest dialects of Modern English (although [yː] for /uː/ is found in some accents in Northern England, and [øː] is a common South African realization of /ɜː/), and some Alemannic German dialects)
- Gallo-Romance languages (except Catalan), a subset of the Romance languages (e.g. French, Occitan, Lombard)
- Albanian
- Ancient Greek
Turkic languages (e.g. Turkish, Azerbaijani)
Mongolic languages (e.g. Kalmyk, Inner Mongolian dialects; but not standard Khalkha)
Uralic languages (e.g. Finnish, Hungarian)