The main purpose of this research was to develop an integrated framework for the description, analysis and interpretation of vowels, which should be applicable first and foremost to Afrikaans, but also to other languages. This broad applicability is, to a large extent, due to the nature of articulatory and acoustic phonetics. This framework can therefore be seen as an attempt to develop a universally applicable descriptive model. Although many well-written works exist which provide detailed discussions on the two types of phonetics, a comprehensive, integrated model such as the one proposed here has not yet been developed. This article is an attempt to contribute to the development of such a framework. I focus on the description of the physical, i.e. the acoustic, characteristics of vowels, as this facet gives one the opportunity to provide a wider-ranging and more precise description, which is imperative when different vowel systems are being compared. Such comparisons include those between the related languages Afrikaans and Dutch, but also, and in particular, the comparison of a number of pronunciation varieties of Afrikaans. The latter is an important aim of this comprehensive research project, of which this article provides an overview. In the absence of sufficient artwork, I have made ample use of Dutch works (particularly that of Rietveld and Van Heuven, 2009), which constitute a comprehensive discussion of the articulation of vowels. Furthermore, these authors personally made available to me a complete set of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), one for each Dutch vowel. The second author also provided his sound files of his reading of the vowels in the framework h_t. This was used in the development of an online interactive vowel chart. As can be seen and heard on this web page, the manner in which vowels are formed (articulated) is illustrated graphically. The pronunciation of vowels is combined with these images. An attractive feature available on this interactive chart is the comparison of the tongue ...