Close-mid back unrounded vowel


The close-mid back unrounded vowel, or high-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is, called "ram's horns". It is distinct from the symbol for the voiced velar fricative,, which has a descender. Despite that, some writings use this symbol for the voiced velar fricative.
Before the 1989 IPA Convention, the symbol for the close-mid back unrounded vowel was, sometimes called "baby gamma", which has a flat top; this symbol was in turn derived from and replaced the inverted small capital A, ⟨Ɐ⟩, that represented the sound before the 1928 revision to the IPA. The symbol was ultimately revised to be, "ram's horns", with a rounded top, in order to better differentiate it from the Latin gamma. Unicode provides only, but in some fonts this character may appear as a "baby gamma" instead.
Some languages feature the mid back unrounded vowel, which is slightly lower. No language has been found to contrast close-mid and mid back unrounded vowels.

Features

Occurrence