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Of all the languages for which there is sufficient data, including extinct languages, which vocalic speech sound, or phone, as represented by the IPA, has been used by more languages, with more frequency than any other?

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By whom? As allophone or phoneme? In which transcription system? With what phonological rules? Etc. The question is not answerable, alas. – jlawler Oct 1 '12 at 1:05
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Vowels are a continuum, so that's probably hard to answer. One way to make the question more answerable might be: Grouping vowels with respect to close/mid/open, front/mid/back and unrounded/rounded, which is the group populated by the most languages. I guess it would also depend on how exactly you distinguish a language from a dialect... – dainichi Oct 1 '12 at 2:08
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Except that "languages" do not "use" IPA symbols. Linguists use IPA symbols, and they use them for many different purposes, phonemic, phonetic, orthographically, educationally, etc. The question is still unanswerable, without further qualification. – jlawler Oct 1 '12 at 16:48
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Given that schwa-centering of unstressed vowels is a common phenomenon it may be the most 'common' in production, but then in those it is only a an allophone, not the underlying form. – LaurenG Oct 1 '12 at 20:15
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the comments above are good to keep in mind. the answer is probably /a/. google "Simple UPSID Interface" to get some quantitative data. – jlovegren Oct 1 '12 at 21:20
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