Japanese language

===Vowels===
[[File:Japanese vowel chart II.svg|thumb|upright=1.15|The vowels of Standard Japanese on a [[vowel chart]]. Adapted from {{harvcoltxt|Okada|1999|p=117}}.]]

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
|+ class="nowrap" | 
!
! [[Front vowel|Front]]
! [[Central vowel|Central]]
! [[Back vowel|Back]]
|-
! [[Close vowel|Close]]
| {{IPA link|i}} || || {{IPA link|ɯ}}
|-
! [[Mid vowel|Mid]]
| {{IPA link|e̞|e}} || || {{IPA link|o̞|o}}
|-
! [[Open vowel|Open]]
| || {{IPA link|ä|a}} ||
|}

Japanese has five vowels, and [[vowel length]] is phonemic, with each having both a short and a long version. Elongated vowels are usually denoted with a line over the vowel (a [[Macron (diacritic)|macron]]) in [[Romanization of Japanese|rōmaji]], a repeated vowel character in [[hiragana]], or a [[chōonpu]] succeeding the vowel in [[katakana]]. {{IPA|/u/}} {{pronunciation|Ja-U.oga|listen|(|help=no}} is [[roundedness|compressed rather than protruded]], or simply unrounded.