Segmental Phenomena in Germanic: Vowels

Germanic languages are typologically rich in their vowel inventories, with many different qualities, often with phonemic length oppositions, including both monophthongs and diphthongs. Vowel contrasts are not only used to mark lexical contrasts (minimal lexical pairs) but often also to mark morphological categories, such as number, case, tense, or person. Vowel harmony, vowel balance, tone (“accent”), and nasalization can be phonologically distinctive in some languages, mostly in those with relatively few speakers. These rich inventories are restricted to the root syllables, which are the locus of word stress in Germanic languages. In unstressed positions, most languages have (nearly) only [ə]; the maximum number of unstressed vowels is five.