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Concept
Schwa
Summary
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (ʃwɑː, rarely ʃwɔː or ʃvɑː; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol ə, placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it usually represents the mid central vowel sound (rounded or unrounded), produced when the lips, tongue, and jaw are completely relaxed, such as the vowel sound of the a in the English word about.
The name schwa and the symbol ə may be used for some other unstressed and toneless neutral vowel, not necessarily mid central, as it is often used to represent reduced vowels in general.
In English, /ə/ is traditionally treated as a weak vowel that may occur only in unstressed syllables, but in accents with the – merger, such as Welsh English, some higher-prestige Northern England English, and some General American, it is merged with /ʌ/ and so /ə/ may then be considered to occur in stressed syllables.
In Albanian, Romanian, Slovene, Balearic Catalan, Mandarin and Afrikaans, schwa can occur in stressed or unstressed syllables.
A similar sound is the short French unaccented ⟨e⟩, which is rounded and less central, more like an open-mid or close-mid front rounded vowel.
Sometimes, the term schwa can be used for any epenthetic vowel. Across languages, schwa vowels are commonly deleted in some instances such as in Hindi, North American English, French and Modern Hebrew. In phonology, syncope is the process of deleting unstressed sounds, particularly unstressed vowels such as schwa.
The term schwa was introduced by German linguists in the 19th century from the Hebrew (שְׁוָא ʃva, classical pronunciation: [ʃə̑wɔː]), the name of the niqqud sign used to indicate the phoneme. It was first used in English texts in the early 1890s.
The symbol ⟨ə⟩ was used first by Johann Andreas Schmeller for the reduced vowel at the end of the German language term Gabe. Alexander John Ellis, in his Palaeotype alphabet, used it for the similar English sound in but bVt. The symbol is an ⟨e⟩ rotated by 180 degrees.
Official source
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