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In linguistics and phonology, schwa is the neutral, mid central unrounded vowel sound, exactly in the middle of the International Phonetic Alphabet vowel chart. In phonetic transcriptions, it is written as ə (rotated e).
Schwa is the most common vowel sound in English, the unstressed vowel in many unstressed syllables, like the 'a' in about or the 'o' in synonym. It is most easily described as sounding like the British English "er" or the American English "uh". It 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 only occurs in unstressed syllables, 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 contrast stressed and unstressed schwas.
Quite a few languages have a schwa sound. It is very similar to a short French unaccented e. It is almost always unstressed, though Bulgarian and Afrikaans are two languages that allow stressed schwas. In the Dutch language, the vowel of the suffix -lijk, as in waarschijnlijk (probably) is pronounced as a schwa. In some varieties of Catalan (notably Barceloni) an unstressed "a" is pronounced as a schwa.
The word "schwa" (pronounced "sh əwa", later "sh əva") originally referred to one of the niqqud vowel points used with the Hebrew alphabet, which looks like a vertical pair of dots under a letter. This sign has two uses, one to indicate the schwa vowel-sound and one to indicate the complete absence of a vowel. These uses do not conflict because schwa is, in Hebrew (and English) considered a "null" sound, the equivalent, or allophone, of "no vowel at all". English or Hebrew speakers asked to pronounce, say "Mxpltzk", are most likely to use schwa at least 3 or 4 times. The schwa sound appears in French or German too, but has its own distinct identity. This is probably the reason the English sound is named after the Hebrew one, rather than the more obvious examples of the same sound in more-related French or German.
The schwa symbol is used in Azeri as a letter, representing a front a vowel. But, when using ə, the Azeri language has problems with the Turkish encoding, so, sometimes ä has been used instead. The schwa symbol is used in the Latin Chechen alphabet as a letter, but the use of this alphabet is politically significant (as Russia prefers the use of the Cyrillic alphabet, against the separatists' preference for Latin). The schwa symbol also is used as letter in some Cyrillic alphabets including: Kazakh, Bashkir, and Udmurt. It was also used in Tatar, Azeri, and Turkmenian, before those languages switched to the Latin alphabet; the schwa is also used by other languages of the ex-USSR. A schwa-umlaut symbol is also used, encoded in Unicode at U+04da Cyrillic capital letter schwa with diaeresis and U+04db Cyrillic small letter schwa with diaeresis and showing in your browser as Ӛ ӛ.
The term "schwa" is also used for vowels of uncertain quantity (rather than neutral sound) in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. It was observed that, while for the most part "a" in Sanskrit corresponds to "a" in Latin and Ancient Greek, there are instances where Sanskrit has "i" while Latin and Greek have "a", such as pitar (Sanskrit) vs pater (Latin and Ancient Greek). Discrepancies between the endings of Greek verbs such as didomi, tithemi, and histami, and the equivalent Sanskrit verbs led to three schwas being postulated for Proto-Indo-European. While most scholars of Proto-Indo-European would accept these three, some scholars postulate yet more schwas to explain further problems in the Proto-Indo-European vowel system. Proto-Indo-European schwa sounds are also called "laryngeals" owing to their possible sound.
Schwa is also the pseudonym and/or description of the underground artist, Bill Barker. |
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