Close front unrounded vowel

The close front unrounded vowel, or high front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound that occurs in many spoken languages, represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by the symbol i. It is similar to the vowel sound in the English word meet—and often called long-e in American English —although in English this sound has additional length (usually being represented as ) and is not normally pronounced as a pure vowel (it is a slight diphthong) – a purer [i] sound is heard in many other languages, such as French, in words like chic.