Near-open front unrounded vowel

Near-open front unrounded vowel
Near-open front unrounded vowel
æ
IPA number	325
Audio sample
	source · help
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	æ
Unicode (hex)	U+00E6
X-SAMPA	{
Braille
Image

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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

Legend: unrounded • rounded

The near-open front unrounded vowel, or near-low front unrounded vowel,^[1] is a type of vowel sound. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨æ⟩, a lowercase of the ⟨Æ⟩ ligature. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as "ash".

The rounded counterpart of [æ], the near-open front rounded vowel (for which the IPA provides no separate symbol) has been reported to occur allophonically in Danish;^[2]^[3] see open front rounded vowel for more information.

In practice, ⟨æ⟩ is sometimes used to represent the open front unrounded vowel; see the introduction to that page for more information.

In IPA transcriptions of Hungarian and Valencian, this vowel is typically written with ⟨ɛ⟩.

^ While the International Phonetic Association prefers the terms "close" and "open" for vowel height, many linguists use "high" and "low".
^ Grønnum (1998:100)
^ Basbøll (2005:46)

[1] While the International Phonetic Association prefers the terms "close" and "open" for vowel height, many linguists use "high" and "low".

[gr100-2] Grønnum (1998:100)

[3] Basbøll (2005:46)

[1]

[2]

[3]