April 6, 2001

schwa

What the heck is a schwa??

Ah, the schwa--the linguist's name for the most common sound in English speech, and for its phonetic symbol.

The sound is that slight "uh" that so often serves as the vowel in an unstressed syllable. It is the sound of a in "alone," e in "system," i in "easily," o in "gallop," and u in "circus." It also occurs in other languages--such as the e in the second syllables of German "schlafen" 'to sleep', French "vendredi" 'Friday', and Dutch "woordenboek" 'dictionary'.

To understand the place of this sound in the language one needs to know a little bit about vowel sounds generally. We make these sounds by using the lips and tongue to vary the shape of the mouth cavity as we speak. Although the role of the lips is easy to see (compare the rounded sound of oh with the unrounded ee), without training it is hard to perceive and describe exactly what we're doing with our tongue. But if we say the word "yeah" several times slowly and concentrate on what's happening, we can feel ourselves moving the tongue down as the word progresses, and with the word "you" we can feel ourselves pulling it back. This highly controlled movement of the tongue--higher and lower and frontwards and backwards in the mouth--allows us to make the wide variety of vowel sounds found in human speech.

The schwa sound is more or less in the middle--the position to which, at least among English speakers, the tongue tends to return in unstressed syllables, or when we're pausing to... uh... think of what to say next. The minimal activity required to produce it takes place in the mid portion of the vertical (high--low) axis of the mouth and in the central portion of the horizontal (front--back) axis, making it a "mid-central" vowel. The sound is neutral (or reduced) because the tongue is relaxed. So we can define the schwa fully and technically as 'a mid-central, neutral vowel sound typically occurring in unstressed syllables'.

The word schwa itself comes from the Hebrew shewa, the name for a diacritical mark representing either the absence of a vowel or a neutral, unstressed vowel in that language. (In English, too, unstressed vowels sometimes disappear entirely; see Word of the Day article syncope and assimilation.) In the International Phonetic Alphabet and in modern dictionaries, however, the schwa is symbolized by what is informally called an "upside-down e." It is better to think of it as a "turned e," however--not flipped upside down, but rotated 180 degrees. I remember having to teach students who had trouble remembering how to turn an e into schwa that it was not a 6 and not a 9. You can see--and hear--the schwa in its proper place in relation to other English vowels in a nicely done, conventionalized representation of where the different vowels are formed in the mouth in a vowel chart at the Web site of the Linguistics Department of the University of Texas.

When The American College Dictionary--the forerunner of today's Random House Webster's College Dictionary-- came out in 1947, it adopted the schwa from the International Phonetic Alphabet and introduced it to the pronunciation systems of American lexicography. This was a daring innovation. I am told that hundreds of letters came into Random House in the late 1940s from upset dictionary buyers, threatening to return the dictionary because our e's were upside-down! I guess it took a while for people to get used to the symbol, but it is now found in virtually all dictionaries that show pronunciations.

Enid