Schwa
In
linguistics, specifically
phonetics and
phonology,
schwa can mean:
*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in any language, often but not necessarily a
mid-
central vowel (rounded or unrounded). Such vowels are often transcribed with the symbol
, regardless of their actual phonetic value.
*The mid-central vowel sound in the middle of the vowel chart, stressed or unstressed. In
IPA phonetic transcription, it is written as
. In this case the term
mid-central vowel may be used instead of
schwa to avoid ambiguity.
*The symbol .
The
word "schwa" is from the
Hebrew word שְׁוָא (
šěwā', ), meaning "nought"—it 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, an
epenthetic vowel, the equivalent of "no vowel at all".
Sometimes the term "schwa" is used for any
epenthetic vowel; however, different languages use different epenthetic vowels.
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. Many
British English (BrE) dialects have two schwa sounds, whereas many
American English (AmE) dialects have only one. 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 including 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.
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
Bulgarian and
Afrikaans are two languages that allow stressed schwas. Many
Caucasian languages and some
Uralic languages (e.g.
Komi) also use phonemic schwa, and allow schwas to be stressed. In the
Dutch language, the vowel of the suffix
-lijk, as in
waarschijnlijk (
probably) is pronounced as a schwa. 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.
Other spellings of the sound include in
Lithuanian, in
Romanian, and ë in
Albanian.
The schwa symbol ("turned e") is used as a
grapheme in various languages:
* In
Azeri it represents a front
a vowel, . But, when using , the Azeri language has problems with the
Turkish encoding, so sometimes ä has been used instead.
*In the Latin
Chechen alphabet. The use of this alphabet is politically significant (as
Russia prefers the use of the
Cyrillic alphabet, against the
separatists' preference for Latin).
*In the Latin transliteration of
Avestan. The corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron .
*In some Cyrillic alphabets including:
Kazakh,
Bashkir,
Udmurt and other languages of the ex-
USSR; see
Schwa (Cyrillic).
In languages where the schwa represents a full phoneme, and may appear word-initially, a capitalized version is sometimes required. In some cases, capital schwa looks like a larger version of the schwa symbol, encoded as U+018F , but an inverted capital E has also been used, e.g. for Avestan personal names (U+018E , with a separately-coded lowercase, U+01DD ).
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 Latin and
Ancient Greek corresponds to
a in
Sanskrit, there are instances where Sanskrit has
i while Latin and Greek have
a, such as
pitar (Sanskrit) vs
pater (Latin and Ancient Greek). This postulated "schwa indogermanicum" evolved into the theory of the so-called
laryngeals. Most scholars of Proto-Indo-European would now postulate three different phonemes rather than a single indistinct schwa. Some scholars postulate yet more, to explain further problems in the Proto-Indo-European vowel system. Most reconstructions of
in older literature would correspond to *-h
2- in contemporary notation.
