Lowered (phonetics)

From Freepedia

In phonetics, a lowered sound is articulated with the tongue or lip lowered (the mouth more open) than some reference point. In the International Phonetic Alphabet this is indicated with the downtack diacritic [  ̞].

In the case of a vowel, lowering means that the vowel is more open. For example, <e̞> represents a vowel somewhere between cardinal [e] and [ɛ], or may even be [ɛ]. Austrian German has a rounded version of the near-open front unrounded vowel [æ], which can be transcribed as [œ̞].

With consonants, lowering changes the manner of articulation. Lowered fricatives are approximants. For example, the ambiguous symbols for rear approximant/fricatives can be specified as approximants with the lowering diacritic, [ʁ̞, ʕ̞, ʢ̞]. In Spanish, the "weak" allophones of the voiced consonants are often transcribed as fricatives, even though they are approximants, at least partially because there is a dedicated symbol for only one of them (the velar). The downtack can be used to disambiguate these as well: [β̞, ð̞, ɣ̞].

• See also Raised.