Tense vowels are made with greater tension in the muscles of the vocal tract than lax vowels. English makes a distinction between tense and lax vowels, which is a distinction that a lot of other languages don’t have.

The final piece of information that we use to classify vowels is a little trickier to explain.

In Canadian English, there are only four vowels that have lip rounding, and they’re all made with the tongue at the back of the mouth: We also classify vowels according to whether the lips are rounded or unrounded. We don’t round our lips for, and we often drop the jaw to move the tongue low and back. The lowest vowel at the back of the mouth is. Your lips are rounded for both of them, but the tongue is higher for than it is for. We can do the same thing at the back of the mouth. You can feel that your tongue is at the front of your mouth and is moving from high in the mouth for to fairly low in the mouth for.

Now do the same thing, but leave off the “b” and the “t” and just say the vowels. The high/mid/low distinction has to do with how high the tongue is in the mouth. That’s because the chart is meant to correspond in a very direct way with the shape of the mouth and the position of the tongue in the mouth. We classify vowels according to four pieces of information: Instead of a nice rectangle, it’s shaped like a trapezoid. We can also round our lips to make the vocal tract even longer. Remember that the difference between consonants and vowels is that consonants have some obstruction in the vocal tract, whereas, for vowels, the vocal tract is open and unobstructed, which makes vowel sounds quite sonorous. We can move the body of the tongue up and down in the mouth and move it closer to the back or front of the mouth.

What a vowels