 the open-mid back unrounded vowel, or low-mid back unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. the symbol in the international phonetic alphabet that represents this sound is , graphically a rotated lowercase vee (called a turned v, though it was created as a small-capital  without the crossbar), and both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as either a wedge, a caret, or a hat. in transcriptions for some languages (including several dialects of english), this symbol is also used for the near-open central vowel. the ipa prefers the terms "close" and "open" for vowels, and the name of the article follows this. however, linguists are known to use the terms "high" and "low". ==features==      ==occurrence== {| class="wikitable" ! colspan="2" | language||word||ipa||meaning||notes |- | rowspan="10" | english || cape town || rowspan="2" |  || rowspan="2" |  || rowspan="2" | 'lot' || rowspan="2" | centralized. it corresponds to a weakly rounded  in all other south african dialects. |- | natal |- | cardiff ||  ||  || 'thought' || centralized, for some speakers it may be rounded and closer. see english phonology |- | cockney || rowspan="2" |  ||  || rowspan="2" | 'no, nah' || centralized, often a diphthong. it corresponds to  in other dialects. see english phonology |- | general south african ||  || may be a diphthong  instead. |- | inland northern american || rowspan="5" | {{lang|en|gut
Vowels