Una vocal larga es aquella que tiene una pronunciación más duradera que una vocal común. En el Alfabeto Fonético Internacional, las vocales largas terminan con [ː]. En la transcripción usual de muchas lenguas, las vocales largas se marcan con un macrón sobre la vocal (ā, ē, ī, ō, ū,...) El sistema fonológico de muchas lenguas indoeuropeas usa la distinción entre vocales largas y cortas para diferenciar algunas palabras. En otras lenguas ,como el italiano, existen vocales fonéticamente más largas, aunque su posición es predictible a partir de la posición del acento, por lo que la diferencia es fonética pero no fonológica. El latín más culto tenía vocales largas, aunque éstas no fueron heredadas por parte de la fonología del español.

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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 inFinnish,Fijian,Japanese,Old English,Scottish GaelicandVietnamese. 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. Many languages do not distinguish vowel length phonemically. Those that do usually distinguish between short vowels and long vowels. A very few languages distinguish three phonemic vowel lengths, such as Luiseño and Mixe. However, some languages with two vowel lengths also have words in which long vowels appear adjacent to other short or long vowels of the same type: Japanese hōō "phoenix" or Ancient Greek ἀάατος [a.áː.a.tos] "inviolable". Some languages that do not ordinarily have phonemic vowel length but permit vowel hiatus may similarly exhibit sequences of identical vowel phonemes that yield phonetically long vowels, such as Georgian გააადვილებ [ɡa.a.ad.vil.eb] "you will facilitate it".

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