Front Rounded Vowels

Front rounded vowels are less common than front unrounded ones. On the other hand, back rounded vowels are more common than back unrounded. Though front rounded vowels are more marked than front unrounded, they occur in a number of languages.

Front rounded vowels are common in the Germanic languages. However, they do not occur in English. They are not common in the Romance languages, but they occur in French and Occitan. Front rounded vowels occur in Albanian, in Turkish and in the Uralic languages of Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. Among Asian languages, front rounded vowels are found in the Sino-Tibetan languages. Mandarin, Cantonese and Tibetan have front rounded vowels.

Front rounded vowels do not exist in English, but they were found in the southwest dialects of Old English and Middle English. In the thirteenth century, they became unrounded. Since front rounded vowels are more marked than front unrounded vowels, it is not surprising that all languages with front rounded vowels have front unrounded.

Cross-linguistically, front rounded vowels are rare. However, they are found in many major languages. These include Mandarin, Cantonese, German, French and Turkish.