The schwa is also known as the lazy vowel because your mouth barely has to open to make the sound, and it's a weak sound. In some words, it's so weak we barely hear it, such as in the words 'interest' and 'chocolate'.
Schwa – The Lazy Sound
You hardly open your mouth to create this vowel sound. The tongue, the lips and the jaw are relaxed. The schwa sound is represented by a /Ə/ in the Phonetic Alphabet (like an upside down 'e' or an 'e' too lazy to sit up!)
From here, we can divide English vowel sounds up into a couple of categories: short vowels, long vowels, diphthongs, vowels before historical R, and weak vowels.
In this section, we'll look at the three ranges of vowel sounds: monophthongs (single vowel sounds within a syllable), diphthongs (two vowels sounds combined within a syllable), and triphthongs (three vowels sounds combined within a syllable).
Examples of a schwa: a: balloon. e: problem. i: family.
For example, consider common words such as rabbit, mitten, animal, carrot, upon, and vinyl. These words all have schwa sounds in the unstressed syllables, but the schwa is associated with a different vowel in each word.
Why? The schwa UH /ə/ vowel is always unstressed, so in a word like banana, that has three syllables, the schwa vowel will be used when the UH sound occurs in an unstressed syllable. Banana has two schwa vowels - buh and nuh - and both of those syllables are unstressed.
While there are thousands of vowel sounds in the world's languages there are only five important ones for singing in any language: I, E, A, O, U, which are pronounced eee, ay (as in hay), ah, oh, and oooo (as in pool).
In writing systems based on the Latin alphabet, the letters A, E, I, O, U, Y, W and sometimes others can all be used to represent vowels. However, not all of these letters represent the vowels in all languages that use this writing, or even consistently within one language.
There are 4 basic sounds from 10 basic vowels, which are ㅏ(a), ㅓ(eo), ㅗ(o), ㅜ(u). Add to them the glide sound [y], and they will become ㅑ(ya), ㅕ(yeo), ㅛ(yo), ㅠ(yu). Of course we should not forget 2 other vowels left which are ㅡ(eu) and ㅣ(i).
Crwth and cwtch are Welsh words that English has adopted. Grrrl and grrls are slang words, and phpht is a commonly accepted onomatopoeic word.
Shh, psst, and hmm do not have vowels, either vowel symbols or vowel sounds. There is some controversy whether they are in fact “words,” however.
Unfortunately, there are no words in English that are made up entirely of vowels, so we will have to settle for the next best thing: a five-letter word containing four of them.
In phonetics, a VOWEL that normally occurs only in unstressed syllables. There are two weak vowels in English SCHWA /ə/, as in the unstressed syllables of above and sofa, and short i /ɪ/, as in the unstressed syllables in RP example and Sophie.
R-colored vowels are exceedingly rare, occurring in less than one percent of all languages. However, they occur in two of the most widely spoken languages: North American English and Mandarin Chinese. In North American English, they are found in words such as dollar, butter, third, color, and nurse.
The weak vowels — sometimes known as closed vowels or semivowels—are i and u.
All the vowel sounds in English are represented by only 5 letters of the alphabet (e.g. a, e, i, o, u). However, there are approximately 19 vowel sounds spoken in Standard Australian English.
The words without vowels are why, hmm, hymn, xlnt, wynd, myths, thy, dry, cyst, etc.
There are 5 vowels: A, E, I, O and U. Even though the letter Y can act as a vowel in some words, I did not consider it a vowel here.
These are the 8 diphthong sounds given below with various examples and phonetic transcription for the words. Out of the eight diphthongs,(1)three diphthongs /eɪ//ɔɪ//aɪ/ glide towards /ɪ/. (2)Two diphthongs /aʊ//əʊ/ glide towards /ʊ/. (3) Three diphthongs /ɪə//ʊə//eə/ glide towards /ə/.
With our revised definition, there are at least 14 vowel sounds that are common to almost all English dialects: These are the sounds in the words BEAT, BIT, BAIT, BET, BAT, BOT, BUTT, BOOT, BITE, BOUT, and BERT. There's also the vowel in PUT, the vowel in BOYS, and a vowel called schwa.
The word “chocolate” does indeed have the schwa sound in it. Depending on how you pronounce it, sometimes it has two. Only the first vowel is usually stressed in this word.
We say a before consonant sounds and an before vowel sounds. So it's an apple, an egg, an ice cream, an orange, an umbrella. Well that sounds easy. Yes, the tricky thing is the schwa sound.
The correct spelling is "zebra." The letter "a" spells schwa in the word "zebra." The letter "o" spells schwa in the word "of." Try again. The letter "o" spells schwa in the word "sailor." Try again. The second syllable of the misspelled word has a schwa sound "uh."