Topic-035: Long Vowels and Diphthongs Long vowels (transcribed with the diacritic [:]) occur in some languages. A contrast of length between short and long) is also sometimes encountered with vowels. Length is an important feature in many ways in speech in English and most other languages, stressed syllables tend to be longer than unstressed. Some languages (such as English) have phonemic differences between long and short sounds, contrasting short vowels (such as i, e, ɒ, υ, ə) with long vowels (i ɑː ɔː u ɜː). Similarly, the most important feature of a diphthong is that it contains a glide from one vowel quality to another one. BBC English contains a large number of diphthongs there are three ending in i (ei, ai, i, two ending in /υ/ ( əυ, a) and three ending in /ə/ (i, e, υə).
