Most modern studies of Swedish phonology take the view that the underlying vowel inventory of Central Standard Swedish comprises nine, rather than seventeen or eighteen, mutually contrasting vowel phonemes. A residual problem of a classic phonological type concerns the borrowed entities, rendered in traditional Swedish orthography as au and eu, whose ‘status in the vowel system is unclear’ (Riad 2014:42). The present paper scrutinizes earlier and current phonological interpretations of these entities, adduces evidence for and against each proposal, and concludes that the case for treating them as phonemic diphthongs /V͡V/, as /VC/-sequences, or as monosyllabic /VV̯/-sequences is weak and that they should in the first place be viewed as underlying heterosyllabic vowel sequences /VV/, subject to a special phonological stipulation valid for a borrowed sub-domain of the lexicon. Typologically, Central Standard Swedish should continue to be subsumed under the category of languages that lack phonological diphthongs.

大多数瑞典语音系学的现代研究都认为，中央标准瑞典语的基础元音清单由九个而不是十七个或十八个相互对比的元音音素组成。经典音系类型的一个残余问题涉及借用实体，这些实体在传统瑞典语正字法中呈现为au和eu，其“在元音系统中的地位尚不清楚”（Riad 2014：42）。本文仔细研究了这些实体的早期和当前的音系解释，列举了支持和反对每个提案的证据，并得出结论，将它们视为音位双元音 /V͡V/、/VC/-序列或单音节 /VV̯/- 的情况序列很弱，它们首先应该被视为潜在的杂音节元音序列/VV/，服从于对借用的词典子域有效的特殊音系规定。从类型上来说，中央标准瑞典语应继续归入缺乏语音双元音的语言类别。