The principle of vowel dispersion claims that vowels are dispersed in the available phonetic space. However, SPAP and UPSID show that deviations from the patterns predicted by this principle are relatively infrequent of, for the most part, confined to matters of small scale, falling into a few definable classes. In this paper, we will discuss the vowel systems of 4 languages, Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese, and will argue that vowels tend toward a balanced and wide dispersion in the available phonetic space by the complementary vowels.
