In English, an unstressed or reduced vowel is the vowel sound that forms the syllable peak of a syllable that has no lexical stress. This sound is typically a schwa, although there are other vowels that can be unstressed or reduced. An reduced vowel is one of the vowels that can only occur in unstressed syllables, like schwa, and an unstressed vowel is one of the vowels that can be stressed but is not. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a phonetic alphabet used by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) the human vocal apparatus can produce. ... Phonetic ™ (pho-NET-ic) is a nationwide voicemail-to-text messaging service available for most digital mobile phones in which a subscriber is provided a special voice mailbox for the purpose of converting all incoming voice messages into actual text for reading via short messaging (also known as SMS, text... In computing, Unicode is the international standard whose goal is to provide the means to encode the text of every document people want to store in computers. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. ... This article discusses the unit of speech. ... In linguistics, stress is the emphasis given to some syllables (often no more than one in each word, but in many languages, long words have a secondary stress a few syllables away from the primary stress, as in the words cóunterfòil or còunterintélligence. ... In linguistics and phonology, schwa is the tonally-neutral, mid-central unrounded vowel sound, exactly in the middle of the vowel chart. ...

Reduced vowels

Schwa is the most common reduced vowel in English, and may be denoted by any of the vowel letters: In linguistics and phonology, schwa is the tonally-neutral, mid-central unrounded vowel sound, exactly in the middle of the vowel chart. ...

• The a in about is a schwa.
• The e in synthesis is a schwa.
• The i in decimal is schwa, except in dialects that have two distinct reduced vowels (see below).
• The o in harmony is a schwa.
• The u in medium is a schwa.
• The y in syringe is a schwa.

Whereas the sound represented by the er in water is a schwa in non-rhotic accents like Received Pronunciation, in rhotic dialects like most of North American English, this sound is not a schwa sound; rather, the "er" designates an r-colored schwa, /ɚ/, which is pronounced like schwa, except the tongue is pulled back in the mouth and "bunched up". English pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic and the non-rhotic, depending on when the letter r (equivalent to Greek rho) is pronounced. ... Received Pronunciation (RP) is a form of pronunciation of the English language, sometimes defined as the educated spoken English of southeastern England. According to the Fowlers Modern English Usage (1965), the term is the Received Pronunciation. RP speech is non-rhotic, meaning that written r is pronounced only if... In phonetics, an r-colored vowel or rhotacized vowel is a vowel either with the tip or blade of the tongue turned up during at least part of the articulation of the vowel (a retroflex articulation) or with the the tip of the tongue down and the back of the...

In some dialects of English there is a distinction between two vowel heights of reduced vowels, schwa and barred i, the close central unrounded vowel /ɨ/. In the British phonetic tradition, /ɪ/ is used to transcribe this vowel in British English instead of /ɨ/, but the sound is the same. An example of a minimal pair contrasting schwa and barred i: In phonetics, vowel height refers to the position of the tongue relative to the roof of the mouth in a vowel sound. ... The close central unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. ... In phonetics, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have a distinct meaning. ...

• The e in roses is a barred i
• The a in Rosa's is a schwa

The other sounds that can serve as the peak of reduced syllables are the syllabic consonants. The consonants that can be syllabic in English are the nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, and the dark l /ɫ/. For example: A nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ... A dark l is a common way of referring to a velarised alveolar lateral approximant. ...

• The m in prism is sometimes a syllabic /m/.
• The on in button is a syllabic /n/ in dialects that pronounce the 'tt' as a glottal stop.
• The word and in the phrase lock and key is sometimes pronounced as a syllabic /ŋ/.
• The le in cycle and bottle is a syllablic /ɫ/.

The glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages. ...

Unstressed vowels

All the other vowels in English can occur in unstressed syllables, although whether a unreduced vowel in such a syllable is really unstressed or merely has secondary stress is debatable. Unstressed [i] and [u] are sometimes considered separately from the other unstressed vowels and are called schwi and schwu, respectively.

For example: