Close-mid back unrounded vowel

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Legend: unrounded • rounded

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 horn." This symbol is distinct from the symbol for the voiced velar fricative ⟨⟩, which has a descender, but some texts still use a ram's horn 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 ⟨⟩, that represented the sound before the 1928 revision to the IPA. The symbol was again revised to be ⟨⟩, "ram's horn", with a rounded top, in order to better differentiate it from the Latin gamma ⟨⟩.

Unicode provides U+0264 ɤ LATIN SMALL LETTER RAMS HORN, but in some fonts this character may appear as a "baby gamma" instead. The superscript IPA version is U+10791 𐞑 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL RAMS HORN. As of Unicode 16.0, there exists a capital ram's horn at U+A7CB Ɤ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER RAMS HORN ⟨⟩.

Features

• Its vowel height is close-mid, also known as high-mid, which means the tongue is positioned halfway between a close vowel (a high vowel) and a mid vowel.
• Its vowel backness is back, which means the tongue is positioned back in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Unrounded back vowels tend to be centralized, which means that often they are in fact near-back.
• Its place of articulation is velar, which means it is articulated with the back of the tongue (the dorsum) at the soft palate.
• It is unrounded, which means that the lips are not rounded.