IPA reference · vowel
ɯ — close back unrounded vowel
/u/ with the lips spread instead of rounded.
How to make the close back unrounded vowel
Say "oo" and then spread the lips into a smile without letting the tongue move forward. The result sounds hollow and slightly strangled.
This sound does not occur in standard English. That means there is no word you can say to find it by accident; you have to build it from the articulatory instruction above and check it against a recording.
Languages that use it
Sounds it gets confused with
Most pronunciation errors are not random — they are a substitution of the nearest sound the speaker already owns. These are the usual substitutions for ɯ, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
The default substitution; in Turkish it breaks vowel harmony.
Learners flatten it to schwa.
What this means for learners
Turkish ı is this vowel, and confusing it with i corrupts every suffix the word takes — a grammatical error, not just a phonetic one.
Teaching this sound
Describing a sound in words gets a student roughly half the way there. The other half is hearing it produced correctly, immediately after producing it incorrectly, with both versions available to replay. That is the argument for recording during the lesson rather than after it: the student leaves with your model of ɯ attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol ɯ make?
ɯ is the close back unrounded vowel. /u/ with the lips spread instead of rounded. It does not occur in standard English.
How do you pronounce ɯ?
Say "oo" and then spread the lips into a smile without letting the tongue move forward. The result sounds hollow and slightly strangled.
Which languages have the close back unrounded vowel?
Among the languages covered here: Turkish (kız, “girl”); Korean (음식, “food”); Thai (มือ, “hand”); Japanese (うみ, “sea (compressed)”).
What is the difference between ɯ and u?
The default substitution; in Turkish it breaks vowel harmony.