[lokedhs]

Very nice chart. It really helps when understanding IPA.

I was trying to find the Swedish "u" sound. According to the Swedish Wikipedia page on the sound, it says it's written as "u" in IPA, but it doesn't sound right at all. The "ʉ" sound is a lot closer, but still not right.

What is the correct IPA representation of the Swedish u, as in "ful"?

[herewulf]

Edit: The Wikipedia phonology article says it's /ʉ/ However, I stand by the fact that the IPA symbols do not always reflect exactly what a speaker produces, so you may be picking up on that (or the speaker in the IPA chart recording isn't quite capable of producing the requisite sound as it's probably not in his native inventory).

IIRC, Swedish /u/ is somewhat fronted, but not quite /ʉ/. It's somewhere inbetween those two. There isn't an IPA symbol for every possible sound, just the most common among languages, but there are diacritics for special cases or more precision.

See the "Advanced" diacritic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

The diacritics are also used for _phonetic_ rather than _phonemic_ renderings as the surrounding sounds in a word, etc. affect the exact outcome of an individual sound. Phonemic renderings in the IPA are typically enclosed in slashes and phonetic in square brackets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

[bradrn]

I don’t speak Swedish, but I found a sketch grammar (Andersson’s) which says that it’s [y]. Not sure if that’s correct or not though.

[herewulf]

Unsurprisingly there's some regional variation. Wikipedia says "Central Standard Swedish /ʉː/ is near-close near-front [ʏː]." Note that [y] and [ʏː] are not the same, but very close. Fascinating!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Vowels