In an effort to enhance the quality of feature vector classification and thereby reduce the recognition error rate of the speaker-independent speech recognition, we employ the Mahalanobis distance in the calculation of the similarity measure between feature vectors. It is assumed that the metric matrix of the Mahalanobis distance be diagonal for the sake of cost reduction in memory and time of calculation. We propose that the diagonal elements be given in terms of the variations of the feature vector components. Geometrically, this prescription tends to redistribute the set of data in the shape of a hypersphere in the feature vector space. The idea is applied to the speech recognition by hidden Markov model with fuzzy vector quantization. The result shows that the recognition is improved by an appropriate choice of the relevant adjustable parameter. The Viterbi score difference of the two winners in the recognition test shows that the general behavior is in accord with that of the recognition error rate.