The Schwa

 

Banana, about, waiter, similar, occur, citrus. Although all these words have different vowels, they all contain the same sound. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (as used by many dictionaries), it is depicted as ‘ə’, and is, I believe, the only one with its own name - the ‘schwa’. When they created the symbols in the nineteenth century, the easiest way to create the extra symbols they needed was to turn the typeface upside down. It is a neutral, unstressed sound, so you could say it is a vowel that is losing its distinctiveness and in some words it disappears entirely. ‘Banana’ has two, the first and last ‘a’. It is also the sound of the -er, -ar and -ur endings (ə r). ‘Occur’ has two schwas; as well as the ending, the ‘o’ at the beginning is one too. ‘Similar’ is interesting because the second ‘i’ is also a schwa, but is also virtually silent. Likewise, another word, ‘difference’ can certainly be reduced to two syllables, where the schwa (-er-) in the middle disappears. It is a useful phenomenon to know about, because it reminds you to be careful about following phonetic pronunciation too closely (any unstressed vowel might be pronounced this way) and it also gives you an idea how the language has evolved and continues to.

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