Swedish Phonology - Vowels

Vowels

All pronunciations below are made by a Swedish male, age 25, in a variety of Central Standard Swedish spoken in the greater Stockholm region.

Swedish has 9 vowels that, as with many other Germanic languages, come in long and short pairs. The length covaries with the quality of the vowels, as shown below, with short variants being more centered and lax. Traditionally, length has been viewed as the primary distinction, with quality being secondary. No short vowels appear in open stressed syllables. The front vowels appear in rounded-unrounded pairs.

/ɛː/, /ɛ/ (in stressed syllables), /øː/ (with a few exceptions), and /œ/ are lowered to, and, respectively, when preceding /r/. In some Swedish varieties, traditionally spoken around Gothenburg and in Östergötland, but today more widely spoken e.g. in Stockholm and especially by younger speakers, is used in other contexts as well. Words like fördömande ('judging') and fördummande ('dumbing') are then often pronounced similarly, if not identically. The use of instead of /ɛː/ and /ɛ/ was earlier more rural and dialectal in e.g. Östergötland, but has during the last decades' dialectal change been common in Eastern dialects around Stockholm and by younger speakers.

• ära /ɛːra/ → ; ('honor') listen
• ärt: /ɛrt/ → ('pea') listen
• öra /øːra/ → ; ('ear') listen
• dörr: /dœr/ → ('door') listen

Unstressed /ɛ/ is realized as, i.e. a basic schwa. This feature is common to most varieties of Swedish. (e.g. begå, 'to commit' /bɛˈɡoː/ → ).

In many central and eastern areas (including Stockholm), the contrast between /ɛ/ and /e/ is lost, especially the short variants, except before /r/ when the small vowel distinction between the words herre 'master' and märr 'mare' is kept. The loss of this contrast has the effect that hetta ('heat') and hätta ('cap') and possibly even veta ('know') and väta ('moisten') are pronounced the same. Long /ɑː/ is pronounced with a small amount of lip-rounding.

In a number of dialects of Swedish, /ʉː/ is a central vowel. However, in Central Standard Swedish it is more front. The primary difference between the two high front rounded vowels /ʉː/ and /yː/ is that /ʉː/ is articulated with compressed lips, while /yː/ uses protruded lips, . /uː/ is also compressed, .

There is some variation in the interpretations of vowel length's phonemicity. Elert (1964), for example, treats vowel quantity as its own separate phoneme (a "prosodeme") so that long and short vowels are allophones of a single vowel phoneme.

Patterns of diphthongs of long vowels occur in three major dialect groups. The Central Swedish glide can be accompanied by a slight frication in the pronunciation of the high vowels /iː/, /yː/, /ʉː/, and /uː/, which are, and . In Southern Swedish dialects, particularly in Scania, the diphthongs are preceded by a rising of the tongue from a central position so that /ʉː/ and /ɑː/ are realized as and respectively, i.e. rising diphthongs. A third type of distinctive diphthongs occur in the dialects of Gotland. The pattern of diphthongs is more complex than those of southern and eastern Sweden; /eː/, /øː/ and /ʉː/ tend to rise while and /ɛː/ and /oː/ fall; /uː/, /iː/, /yː/ and /ɑː/ are not diphthongized at all.