In
linguistics,
vowel length is the perceived
duration of a
vowel sound. Often the
chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may have arisen from one etymologically, such as in
Australian English. While not distinctive in most other dialects of
English, vowel length is an important
phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Finnish, Fijian, Japanese,
Old English, and Vietnamese. It plays a phonetic role in the majority of dialects of British English, and is said to be phonemic in a few other dialects, such as Australian English,
South African English and
New Zealand English. It also plays a lesser phonetic role in
Cantonese, unlike other
varieties of Chinese.