Proper Pronunciation Guide
schwa
[ʃwɑ]
Tips:
- Pronounce the letters “sch” as /ʃ/.
- Pronounce the final letter “a” as [ɑ] — like the first vowel in “father.”
Practice Sentence:
| The frequent use of the schwa, or the schwa vowel, will make your pronunciation seem smooth and natural. |
Definition:
(noun) In English the weak, neutral vowel occurring in unstressed syllables and short unstressed function words, such as “and” and “the,” represented by the international phonetic symbol
/ə/ .
|The symbol for the schwa /ə/ is not only used in dictionaries using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) but also in those dictionaries of English, which other than this symbol do not use the IPA. (From Hebrew: a diacritic similar to an apostrophe for marking where a vowel sound should occur between two consonants, since written Hebrew has no vowel letters. This is sort of like the schwa that appears in English between/ð/ and/m/ in he word “rhythm” and between/t/ and/d/ in the contraction “it’d.”)
Notes:
The schwa is by far the most often used vowel in English, occurring in perhaps as much as 90 to 95 % of all unstressed syllables, often occurring two or more times in a single word: banana [bə
næ nə] or comparison [kəm pɛ͜ɚ
ə sən]. Pronouncing the schwa vowel at every opportunity to do so helps maintain good rhythm and smoothness in speaking as well as not make the speaker sound “over-pronounced,” as in “direct” [dɑ͜i rɛk̚t], “innocent” [
ɪ no͜u sɛnt], “police” [po͜u lis], “focus” [fo͜u kus], “July” [ʤu lɑ͜i], “tremendous” [trə mɛn do͜us], and “a” [e͜i], as in “a book” [e͜i bʊk].