Lazy Schwa

By Jennie Parker

​I think of “schwa” as the laziest sound in the English language. Imagine daydreaming in class while the teacher is at the board.  Suddenly, she calls on you, and you have no idea what she just asked. You nervously begin, “Uhhhh…” This is the central vowel “schwa,” which looks like /ə/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet.*  To make the schwa sound, open your lips slightly and leave them in a neutral position, relax your lips, and move your tongue to the middle of your mouth.

(Listen to "schwa")

​I also think of “schwa” as lazy because we turn many unstressed syllables into the “schwa” sound. In fact, roughly 20% of words in English contain a “schwa.” The sound can be spelled with any vowel, as in relative, elephant, mistake, today, and difficult, and a few vowel combinations, as in motion. So, within a word, unstressed syllables are often shortened to “schwa;” in addition, within a sentence, unstressed words (i.e., function words) are often shortened to “schwa,” as well. (See “Understanding the Rhythm of English” for more on rhythm and function words).

For example, the word “than” in isolation is pronounced /ðæn/. However, within the context of a sentence, it gets reduced to /ðən/. For example, “He’s taller than you.” (Listen). Listen to a few other examples of this phenomenon:

1. You have as many toys as he has. (Listen)

2. Meet me at six. (Listen)

3. She has left the room. (Listen)

4. I can dance. (Listen)

In these examples, the vowels in many of the function words are reduced to “schwa.” Remember, function words include articles, prepositions, pronouns, and positive auxiliaries.

For some fun facts about “schwa,” see language blogger and linguist Arika Okrent’s post, which describes “schwa” as the laziest sound there is! https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56821/9-fun-facts-about-schwa
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*the same sound is also sometimes represented as /ʌ/ when the syllable is stressed, as in under and Doug.