Vowel space area calculated on the basis of the corner vowels has emerged as a metric for the study of regional variation, speech intelligibility, and speech development. We verify the basic assumptions underlying both the concept of the vowel space and the utility of the vowel space area in making speaker, dialect, or language comparisons. Undeniably, the traditional vowel triangle and vowel quadrilateral both fail as a metric in the context of dialect variation because substantial parts of the actual working space are excluded from analysis. Utilizing the formant values at a number of different locations for a wider range of individual vowels has significant implications for the size and shape of the resulting vowel space. Indeed, dialectal variations in vowel production can best be characterized in terms of formant density regions in the formant space and not as locations of individual vowel categories. The formant density approach is based on the assumption that vowel sounds are dynamically changing multidimensional units, which naturally overlap in the acoustic space. The formant density approach is able to minimize the amount of empty space within the overall shape while still respecting the outer boundary of the dataset.