Schwa - Description

Description

Sometimes the term "schwa" is used for any epenthetic vowel, even though different languages use different epenthetic vowels (e.g., the Navajo epenthetic vowel is ).

In English, schwa is the most common vowel sound. It is a reduced vowel in many unstressed syllables, especially if syllabic consonants are not used. Depending on dialect, it may correspond to any of the following orthographic letters:

• like the 'a' in about
• like the 'e' in taken
• like the 'i' in pencil
• like the 'o' in eloquent
• like the 'u' in supply
• like the 'y' in sibyl

Schwa is a very short neutral vowel sound, and like all vowels, its precise quality varies depending on the adjacent consonants. In most varieties of English, schwa mostly occurs in unstressed syllables (exceptions include BrE concerted), but in New Zealand English and South African English the high front lax vowel (as in the word bit) has shifted open and back to sound like schwa, and these dialects include both stressed and unstressed schwas. In General American, schwa is one of the two vowel sounds that can be rhotacized. This sound is used in words with unstressed "er" syllables, such as dinner. For more information see Stress and vowel reduction in English.

Quite a few languages have a sound similar to schwa. It is similar to a short French unaccented e, which in that language is rounded and less central, more like an open-mid or close-mid front rounded vowel. It is almost always unstressed, though Albanian, Bulgarian, Slovene and Afrikaans are some of the languages that allow stressed schwas. In most dialects of Russian an unstressed a or o reduces to a schwa. In dialects of Kashubian a schwa occurs. Many Caucasian languages and some Uralic languages (e.g. Komi) also use phonemic schwa, and allow schwas to be stressed. In Dutch, the vowel of the suffix -lijk, as in waarschijnlijk (probably) is pronounced as a schwa. In Dutch adjective words carry a schwa at their ending 'rood' becomes 'rode'. Anytime an 'e' falls at the end of Dutch words it becomes a schwa. Compare 'de' and 'het'. In the Eastern dialects of Catalan, including the standard language variety, based in the dialect spoken in and around Barcelona, an unstressed "a" or "e" is pronounced as a schwa (called "vocal neutra", "neutral vowel"). In the dialects of Catalan spoken in the Balearic Islands, a stressed schwa can occur. Stressed schwa can occur in Romanian as in mătură ('broom'). In European and some African dialects of Portuguese, the schwa occurs in many unstressed syllables that end in "e", such as noite (night), tarde (afternoon, late), pêssego (peach), and pecado (sin). However, that is rare in Brazilian Portuguese except in such areas as Curitiba in the state of Paraná. In Neapolitan a final,unstressed "a", and unstressed "e" and "o" are pronounced as a schwa : pìzza (pizza), semmàna (week), purtuàllo (orange) . The inherent vowel in the Devanagari script, an abugida used to write Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit is a schwa, written अ in isolation or to begin a word.

Other characters used to represent this sound include ը in Armenian, ă in Romanian, and ë in Albanian. In Bulgarian Cyrillic, the letter ъ, which has a much different orthographic function in modern Russian, is used. In Korean, the letter (or rather jamo) ㅡ is used, though it may also represent a "null" vowel used in the transcription of foreign consonant clusters, where it may be deleted.