The near-open front unrounded vowel, or near-low front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a lowercase of the ligature. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as "ash".
The rounded counterpart of , the near-open front rounded vowel (for which the IPA provides no separate symbol) has been reported to occur allophonically in Danish; see open front rounded vowel for more information.
In practice, is sometimes used to represent the open front unrounded vowel; see the introduction to that page for more information.
In IPA transcriptions of Hungarian and Valencian, this vowel is typically written with .