Vowel Length - Phonemic Vowel Length

Phonemic Vowel Length

Many languages make a phonemic distinction between long and short vowels: Sanskrit, Japanese, Hebrew, Finnish, Hungarian, Kannada etc.

Long vowels may or may not be separate phonemes. In Latin and Hungarian, long vowels are separate phonemes from short vowels, thus doubling the number of vowel phonemes.

Japanese long vowels are analyzed as either two same vowels or a vowel + the pseudo-phoneme /H/, and the number of vowels is five.

Estonian has three distinctive lengths, but the third is suprasegmental, as it has developed from the allophonic variation caused by now-deleted grammatical markers. For example, half-long 'aa' in saada comes from the agglutination *saata+ka "send+(imperative)", and the overlong 'aa' in saada comes from *saa+ta "get+(infinitive)". One of the very few languages to have three lengths, independent of vowel quality or syllable structure, is Mixe. An example from Mixe is "guava", "spider", "knot". Similar claims have been made for Yavapai and Wichita.

Four-way distinctions have been claimed, but these are actually long-short distinctions on adjacent syllables. For example, in kiKamba, there is, "hit", "dry", "bite", "we have chosen for everyone and are still choosing".