In speech, an echo vowel is a vowel that repeats the final vowel

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...

 in a word. For example, in Chumash, when a word ends with a glottal stop

Glottal stop

The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...

 and comes at the end of an intonation unit, the final vowel is repeated after the glottal stop, but is whispered and faint, as in jaʔḁ for /jaʔ/ "arrow" (written ya). In Rukai

Rukai language

Rukai is the mother tongue of the Rukai, one indigenous people of Taiwan . It is a divergent Formosan language of the Austronesian languages language family. There are some 10,000 speakers, some monolingual. There are several dialects, of which Mantauran, Tona, and Maga are divergent.Rukai is...

 (Taiwan), echo vowels are pronounced as full vowels. However, they are not only predictable, but disappear when under reduplication or when a suffix beginning with /a/ is added to the word.

	Agent focus	suffix	reduplication
echo vowel	wa-uŋulu	uŋul-a	ara uŋul-uŋulu
	drinks	drink!	don't drink
phonemic vowel	wa-kanə	kanə-a	ara kanə-kanə
	eats	eat!	don't eat

Echo vowels are also found in writing, especially with syllabaries

Syllabary

A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent syllables, which make up words. In a syllabary, there is no systematic similarity between the symbols which represent syllables with the same consonant or vowel...

. For example, a word kab may be written as if it were kaba, and keb would be written as if it were kebe. Such as system is found in Maya

Maya script

The Maya script, also known as Maya glyphs or Maya hieroglyphs, is the writing system of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization of Mesoamerica, presently the only Mesoamerican writing system that has been substantially deciphered...

, though with complications after some consonants. In Linear B

Linear B

Linear B is a syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek, an early form of Greek. It pre-dated the Greek alphabet by several centuries and seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilization...

, such final consonants were simply not written. However, consonant clusters were separated with echo vowels, for example writing the city Knossos

Knossos

Knossos , also known as Labyrinth, or Knossos Palace, is the largest Bronze Age archaeological site on Crete and probably the ceremonial and political centre of the Minoan civilization and culture. The palace appears as a maze of workrooms, living spaces, and store rooms close to a central square...

 as if it were konoso. In Ainu, some writers write final /r/ with a subscript kana

Kana

Kana are the syllabic Japanese scripts, as opposed to the logographic Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as rōmaji...

for ra, re, ri, ro, or ru, depending on the preceding vowel, whereas others use a subscript ru in all cases.