How many peripheral low vowels can you have?: Low vowel contrasts in Vouvantais

Relatively little attention has been paid to possible low vowel systems in the worldʹs languages. While most languages appear to have only one low vowel, some have two, and in rare cases, three contrastive low vowels. Here we make the case for the largest low vowel system yet reported: five low vowels are shown to be contrastive in Vouvantais, a moribund language variety related to French. After outlining the system and its unusual characteristics, including contrasts not previously reported, we consider how the system developed, as well as its implications for distinctive feature representation and for current transcriptional practices. We see that while the facts of Vouvantais can be dealt with, if not predicted, by means of available binary features, they remain much more problematic for transcription and observation by linguists, leading to an under-reporting of some vowels across languages.