Schwa

:See Schwa (art) for the underground artist.

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In linguistics and phonology, schwa is the tonally-neutral, mid-central unrounded vowel sound, exactly in the middle of the vowel chart. In IPA phonetic transcription, it is written as (rotated e).

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The word "schwa" (pronounced ) 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".

Linguistics: Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. (Lay people sometimes use the term linguistician, but as Aitchison 2003 points out, this is "too much of a tongue-twister to become generally accepted.")...

Phonology: Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function - within a given language or across langua...

Vowel: In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by an open configuration of the vocal tract where there is no build-up of air pressure above the glottis, in contrast to consonants, which are characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tr...