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Reference vowels used to describe the sounds of languages

Cardinal vowels are a set of reference vowels used by phoneticians in describing the sounds of languages. They are classified depending on the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth, how far forward or back is the highest point of the tongue, and the position of the lips (rounded or unrounded). A cardinal vowel is a vowel sound produced when the tongue is in an extreme position, either front or back, high or low. The current system was systematised by Daniel Jones in the early 20th century, though the idea goes back to earlier phoneticians, notably Ellis and Bell.

The usual explanation of the cardinal vowel system implies that the competent user can reliably distinguish between sixteen Primary and Secondary vowels plus a small number of central vowels. The provision of diacritics by the International Phonetic Association further implies that intermediate values may also be reliably recognized, so that a phonetician might be able to produce and recognize not only a close mid front unrounded vowel and an open mid front unrounded vowel but also a mid front unrounded vowel , a centralized mid front unrounded vowel , and so on. This suggests a range of vowels nearer to forty or fifty than to twenty in number. Empirical evidence for this ability in trained phoneticians is hard to come by. Ladefoged, in a series of pioneering experiments published in the 1950s and 60s, studied how trained phoneticians coped with the vowels of a dialect of Scottish Gaelic. He asked eighteen phoneticians to listen to a recording of ten words spoken by a native speaker of Gaelic and to place the vowels on a cardinal vowel quadrilateral. He then studied the degree of agreement or disagreement among the phoneticians. Ladefoged himself drew attention to the fact that the phoneticians who were trained in the British tradition established by Daniel Jones were closer to each other in their judgments than those who had not had this training. However, the most striking result is the great divergence of judgments among all the listeners regarding vowels that were distant from Cardinal values.