Open-mid central rounded vowel

Open-mid central rounded vowel
ɞ
IPA Number395
Audio sample
Encoding
Entity (decimal)ɞ
Unicode (hex)U+025E
X-SAMPA3\
Braille⠦ (braille pattern dots-236)⠜ (braille pattern dots-345)
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Spectrogram of ɞ

The open-mid central rounded vowel, or low-mid central rounded vowel,[1] is a vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɞ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is 3\. The symbol is called closed reversed epsilon. It was added to the IPA in 1993; before that, this vowel was transcribed ⟨ɔ̈⟩.

IPA charts were first published with this vowel transcribed as a closed epsilon, ⟨ʚ⟩ (that is, a closed variant of ⟨ɛ⟩, much as the high-mid vowel letter ⟨ɵ⟩ is a closed variant of ⟨e⟩), and this variant made its way into Unicode as U+029A ʚ LATIN SMALL LETTER CLOSED OPEN E. The IPA charts were later changed to the current closed reversed epsilon ⟨ɞ⟩, and this was adopted into Unicode as U+025E ɞ LATIN SMALL LETTER CLOSED REVERSED OPEN E.

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