IPA reference · vowel
ɨ — close central unrounded vowel
A high vowel made in the centre of the mouth with spread lips.
How to make the close central unrounded vowel
Say /i/ and pull the tongue straight back without lowering it or rounding the lips. Alternatively, say /u/ and unround.
English reference points: roses (the second vowel, in some accents). If you speak English natively you already produce this sound — the work is recognising it and placing it where the target language wants it.
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 ɨ, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Phonemic in Russian and Polish: *быть* versus *бить*.
What this means for learners
In Russian and Polish this vowel also signals that the preceding consonant is hard rather than soft, so it carries a second layer of information.
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 ɨ attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol ɨ make?
ɨ is the close central unrounded vowel. A high vowel made in the centre of the mouth with spread lips. In English you can hear it in: roses (the second vowel, in some accents).
How do you pronounce ɨ?
Say /i/ and pull the tongue straight back without lowering it or rounding the lips. Alternatively, say /u/ and unround.
Which languages have the close central unrounded vowel?
Among the languages covered here: Russian (ты, “you”); Polish (ty, “you”); Romanian (în, “in”).
What is the difference between ɨ and i?
Phonemic in Russian and Polish: *быть* versus *бить*.