Schwa

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This article is about the vowel. For other uses, see Schwa (disambiguation).

The IPA symbol for the Schwa

In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (sometimes spelled
shwa)[1][2] can mean the following:

An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not
necessarily a mid-central vowel. Such vowels are often transcribed with the
symbol <>, regardless of their actual phonetic value.
The mid-central vowel sound (rounded or unrounded) 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 term
The word schwa is from the Hebrew word shva

shewa, pronounced [wa], modern

shva [va]), which designates the Hebrew niqqud vowel sign shva " that in modern
Hebrew indicates either the phoneme /e/ or the complete absence of a vowel. Also the
Hebrew shva is sometimes represented by the upside-down e symbol for Schwa, a
misleading transliteration, since the Schwa vowel is not representative of modern
Hebrew pronunciation of shva and is not characteristic of earlier pronunciations either
(see Tiberian vocalization Mobile Shwa = Shwa na'). The spelling "schwa" is
German in origin.

Schwa as a vowel
Main articles: Epenthesis, Unstressed vowel, and Vowel reduction
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 [i]).

Schwa is the most common vowel sound in English, a reduced vowel in many
unstressed syllables, especially if syllabic consonants are not used:

like the 'a' in about [bat]

like the 'e' in taken [tekn]

like the 'i' in pencil [pnsl]

like the 'o' in eloquent [lkwnt]

like the 'u' in supply [spla]

like the 'y' in sibyl [sbl]

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.
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.[clarification needed] 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 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 mtur [mtur] ('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), pssego (peach), and pecado (sin). However, that is rare in
Brazilian Portuguese except in such areas as Curitiba in the state of Paran. The
inherent vowel in the Devanagari script, an abugida used to write Hindi, Marathi,
Nepali, and Sanskrit is a schwa, written in isolation or to begin a word.
Other characters used to represent this sound include in Armenian, in Romanian,
and in Albanian. In Bulgarian Cyrillic, the letter is used, and in Korean, the
letteris used.

Schwa in Indonesian and Malay

In Indonesian, schwa can be stressed or not. Most of the times, the letter <e> is read as a
schwa.

There is also a phenomenon of pronouncing the a in the final syllable (usually second
syllable, since most Indonesian root words consist of two syllables) as a stressed schwa.
Examples:

datang (=come), pronounced [dat], and often written as dateng in informal

writing.

kental (=viscous), pronounced [kntl].

hitam (=black), pronounced [itm], written as item in informal language.

dalam (=deep, in), pronounced [dalm], often written as dalem.

malam (=night), pronounced [malm], written as malem in informal language.

Indonesian orthography formerly used unmarked <e> only for the schwa sound, while
the full vowel /e/ was written <>. Malay orthography, on the other hand, formerly
indicated the schwa with <> called ppt), while unmarked <e> stood for /e/.
In the 1972 spelling reform that unified Indonesian and Malaysian spelling conventions
(Ejaan yang Disempurnakan, regulated by MABBIM), it was agreed to use neither
diacritic.[3] Hence there is no orthographic distinction any longer between // and /e/;
both are spelled with unmarked <e>. This means the pronunciation of any given letter e
in Indonesian and Malay is not immediately obvious to the learner, and must be learned
separately. For example, the word for 'wheeled vehicle', formerly spelled kerta in
Indonesia and kreta in Malaysia, is now spelled kereta in both countries.
In southern Malaysian pronunciation, which is considered the standard, the final letter a represents schwa, while final -ah stands for /a/. The dialect of Kedah in northern
Malaysia, however, pronounces final -a as /a/ also. In loanwords, a nonfinal short /a/
may become schwa in Malay. For example, Mekah (<Arabic Makkah, Malay
pronunciation [mka]).

Schwa in Azeri
When the new Latin script was introduced for the Azerbaijani language on December
25, 1991, A-umlaut was selected to represent the sound //. However, on May 16, 1992,
it was replaced by the schwa. Although use of (also used in Tatar, Turkmen, and
Gagauz) seems to be a simpler alternative as the schwa is absent in most character sets,
particularly Turkish encoding, it was reintroduced; the schwa had existed continuously
from 1929 to 1991 to represent Azeri's most-common vowel, in both post-Arabic
alphabets (Latin and Cyrillic) of Azerbaijan.

Schwa syncope in Hindi

Although the Devanagari script is used as a standard to write modern Hindi, the schwa
'', sometimes written as 'a') implicit in each consonant of the script is obligatorily
deleted" at the end of words and in certain other contexts.[4] This phenomenon has been
termed the "schwa syncope rule" or the "schwa deletion rule" of Hindi.[4][5] One
formalization of this rule has been summarized as -> | VC_CV. In other words,

when a vowel-preceded consonant is followed by a vowel-succeeded consonant, the

schwa inherent in the first consonant is deleted.[5][6] However, this formalization is
inexact and incomplete (i.e. sometimes deletes a schwa when it shouldn't or, at other
times, fails to delete it when it should), and can yield errors. Schwa deletion is
computationally important because it is essential to building text-to-speech software for
Hindi.[6][7]
As a result of schwa syncope, the correct Hindi pronunciation of many words differs
from that expected from a literal rendering of Devanagari. For instance,
is Rm
(incorrect: Rma),
is Rachn (incorrect: Rachan),
is Vd (incorrect:
Vda) and
is Namkeen (incorrect Namakeen).[6][7]

Schwa indogermanicum
Main article: Laryngeal theory
The term "schwa" is also used for vowels of uncertain quality (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 *-h2in contemporary notation.

See also

R-colored vowel
Weak form and strong form

Further reading

Marc van Oostendorp (1999). "Schwa in Phonological Theory".

http://www.vanoostendorp.nl/fonologie/schwaip.htm. Retrieved 2008-01-29.

References
1. ^ Oxford English Dictionary, under "schwa".
2. ^ Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-22606067-5, ISBN 90-272-1892-7
3. ^ Asmah Haji Omar, ""The Malay Spelling Reform"". Journal of the Simplified
Spelling Society (2): 913. 1989.
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j11/malay.php.
4. ^ a b Larry M. Hyman, Victoria Fromkin, Charles N. Li (1988 (Volume 1988,
Part 2)), Language, speech, and mind, Taylor & Francis, ISBN 0415003113,
http://books.google.com/books?id=R6IOAAAAQAAJ, "... The implicit /a/ is not

read when the symbol appears in word-final position or in certain other contexts
where it is obligatorily deleted (via the so-called schwa-deletion rule which
plays a crucial role in Hindi word phonology ..."
5. ^ a b Tej K. Bhatia (1987), A history of the Hindi grammatical tradition: HindiHindustani grammar, grammarians, history and problems, BRILL,
ISBN 9004079246, http://books.google.com/books?id=jJOXzRXsSK0C, "...
Hindi literature fails as a reliable indicator of the actual pronunciation because
it is written in the Devanagari script ... the schwa syncope rule which operates
in Hindi ..."
6. ^ a b c Monojit Choudhury, Anupam Basu and Sudeshna Sarkar (July 2004), "A
Diachronic Approach for Schwa Deletion in Indo Aryan Languages",
Proceedings of the Workshop of the ACL Special Interest Group on
Computational Phonology (SIGPHON) (Association for Computations
Linguistics), http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W/W04/W04-0103.pdf, "...
schwa deletion is an important issue for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion of
IAL, which in turn is required for a good Text-to-Speech synthesizer ..."
7. ^ a b Naim R. Tyson, Ila Nagar (2009 (12:1525)), "Prosodic rules for schwadeletion in hindi text-to-speech synthesis", International Journal of Speech
Technology,
http://www.springerlink.com/content/131xm66677g74418/fulltext.pdf, "...
Without the appropriate deletion of schwas, any speech output would sound
unnatural. Since the orthographical representation of Devanagari gives little
indication of deletion sites, modern TTS systems for Hindi implemented schwa
deletion rules based on the segmental context where schwa appears ..."
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