Vowel
Words without vowels

In rhotic dialects of English, as in Canada and the United States, there are many words such as bird, learn, girl, church, worst, worm, myrrh that some phoneticians analyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic consonant /ɹ̩/. However, others analyze these words instead as having a rhotic vowel, /ɝː/. The difference may be partially one of dialect.

There are a few such words that are disyllabic, like cursor, curtain, and turtle:, and (or,, and), and even a few that are trisyllabic, at least in some accents, such as purpler, hurdler, gurgler, and certainer.

The word and frequently contracts to a simple nasal ’n, as in lock 'n key. Words such as will, have, and is regularly contract to ’ll, ’ve, and ' s. However, none of them are pronounced alone without vowels, so they are not phonological words. Onomatopoeic words that can be pronounced alone, and that have no vowels or ars, include hmm, pst!, shh!, tsk !, and zzz. As in other languages, onomatopoeiae stand outside the normal phonotactics of English.

There are other languages that form lexical words without vowel sounds. In Serbo-Croatian, for example, the consonants and (the difference is not written) can act as a syllable nucleus and carry rising or falling tone; examples include the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda and geographic names such as Krk. In Czech and Slovak, either or can stand in for vowels: vlk "wolf", krk "neck". A particularly long word without vowels is čtvrthrst, meaning "quarter-handful", with two syllables (one for each R), or scvrnkls, a verb form meaning "you flipped (sth) down" (eg a marble). Whole sentences (usually tongue-twisters) can be made from such words, such as Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick a finger through your neck" (pronounced), and Smrž pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh. (Here zvlhl has two syllables based on L; and the preposition z consists of a single consonant. Only prepositions do this in Czech, and they normally link phonetically to the following word, so not really behave as vowelless words.) In Russian, there are also prepositions that consist of a single consonant letter, like k, ' to ', v, ' in ', and s, ' with '. However, these forms are actually contractions of ko, vo, and so respectively, and these forms are still used in modern Russian before words with certain consonant clusters for ease of pronunciation.

In Kazakh and certain other Turkic languages, words without vowel sounds may occur due to reduction of weak vowels. A common example is the Kazakh word for one: bir, pronounced. Among careful speakers, however, the original vowel may be preserved, and the vowels are always preserved in the orthography.

In Southern varieties of Chinese, such as Cantonese and Minnan, some monosyllabic words are made of exclusively nasals, such as Cantonese "no" and "five". Minnan also has words consisting of a consonant followed by a syllabic nasal, such as pn̄g "cooked rice".

So far, all of these syllabic consonants, at least in the lexical words, have been sonorants, such as,,, and, which have a voiced quality similar to vowels. (They can carry tone, for example.) However, there are languages with lexical words that not only contain no vowels, but contain no sonorants at all, like (non-lexical) shh! in English. These include some Berber languages and some languages of the American Pacific Northwest, such as Nuxalk. An example from the latter is scs "seal fat" (pronounced, as spelled), and a longer one is clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' (pronounced) "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant". (Follow the Nuxalk link for other examples.) Berber examples include /tkkststt/ "you took it off" and /tfktstt/ "you gave it". Some words may contain one or two consonants only: /ɡ/ "be", /ks/ "feed on". (In Mandarin Chinese, words and syllables such as sī and zhī are sometimes described as being syllabic fricatives and affricates phonemically, /ś/ and /tʂ́/, but these do have a voiced segment that carries the tone.) In the Japonic language Miyako, there are words with no voiced sounds, such as ss 'dust', kss 'breast/milk', pss 'day', ff 'a comb', kff 'to make', fks 'to build', ksks 'month', sks 'to cut', psks 'to pull'.

Some analyses of Wandala is reported to have no phonemic vowels.
language:response_language[Polish]