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As a result of the cooperation in the Intas 915 project, annotated speech corpora have become available in three different languages for both read and spontaneous speech of some 4-5 male and 4-5 female speakers per language (6-10 minutes per speaker). These data have been used to study the effects of redundancy on acoustic vowel reduction, in terms of vowel duration, F1-F2 distance to a virtual target of reduction, spectral center of gravity, and vowel intensity. It was shown that in all three (typologically different) languages vowel redundancy increases acoustic reduction in the same way. The reduction of redundant vowels seems to be a language universal.