Flying in the face of public belief, linguists from the Cambridge, Oxford and Swindon Univestities have declared the English language to have somewhere in the region of forty vowels. There are the five normative vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and the "sometimes" (y). The remaining "dark" vowels fill the remaining language space around dipthongs and tripthongs which had previously puzzled lexographers, grammiticians and crossword compilers for years.