back vowel
- noun
- /bæk ˈvaʊəl/
- Specialized
:
vocal posterior
- The 'u' in 'rule' is an example of a back vowel produced with the tongue placed far back in the mouth.
Examples
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OK, now I've kind of color-coded the vowels here you can see there are some front vowels that are red and some back vowels that are blue.
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However, in agreement with Ingle et al. (2005), neither of these back vowels in our data shows as much fronting as is seen in Southern California.
Academic text (2012) -
The mid-back vowel /o/ was excluded because it is a diphthong in the PNW region (Ingle et al., 2005).
Academic text (2012) -
In phonetics class, we studied how the back vowels like 'o' in 'pole' are articulated compared to front vowels.
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Understanding back vowels is essential for mastering pronunciation in languages like English.
How Back
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'vowel' names the speech sound and 'back' describes its place toward the rear of the mouth, so a learner who knows both words can infer it denotes a vowel produced with the tongue positioned toward the back. This type of descriptive naming for articulation is cross-linguistically common and follows transparent English noun-adjective composition, so it should be understandable to a B1 learner.
Etymology
Back vowel comes from the simple image of the tongue moving to the back of the mouth when you say sounds like the 'u' in 'rule' or the 'o' in 'pole'. So, back + vowel simply means 'a vowel made with the tongue at the back of the mouth'.
