Schwa · the reduced vowel The most frequent vowel in English, and it exists only in unstressed syllables. The tongue lies flat, nothing is tensed, the lips are neither rounded nor spread — it has no fixed quality and drifts toward its neighbours.
Three steps to /ə/
Relax everything, then give the stress away.
Relax completely
Tongue flat in the middle of the mouth, unstressed and unpressed; lips neutral; jaw half open. The nearly flat tongue in the drawing is the whole thing — no part is working.
Give the stress to another syllable
/ə/ is the absence of stress. about carries it on /baʊt/, so the first syllable collapses to /ə/. Move the stress and the vowel collapses with it.
Self-check: it should be almost inaudible
The second syllable of sofa must be clearly quieter than the first. If both are equally loud, you are not producing /ə/. Louder than checking lip shape.
Articulation (side view)
One speaker, one instant: tongue position and lip shape only. The amber circle marks what to look at; the caption says how it differs from the sound it is usually confused with.
Spelling: almost any vowel letter can become /ə/
The counter-intuitive part — a, e, i, o and u all reduce, because in spelling schwa has no identity.
The most common mapping: unstressed a is almost always /ə/.
★ These are not /ə/ but r-coloured /ɚ/ (with a curl in American English). This page deliberately uses no r-words.
Unstressed o reduces too: the first syllable of support.
Third syllable of animal, second of problem — any vowel letter can collapse in a weak position.
Why learners replace /ə/
Every syllable in many L1s carries a full tone and a full vowel — and /ə/ is defined by not being full.
Replaced by a full back vowel
A back unrounded vowel has a defined quality and usually fills a syllable. Schwa raises no part of the tongue at all.
In the drawing the tongue is nearly flat for /ə/; a full back vowel lifts the tongue back.
Stress not moved, vowel kept full
about → /ˈæbaʊt/, computer → /ˈkɑmpjuːtər/. If the stress stays, the vowel has no reason to reduce.
This is the root cause: most /ə/ errors are stress errors, not mouth-shape errors.
Final /ə/ read as /ɑ/
sofa → /ˈsoʊfɑ/. The L1 open vowel is right there and strong.
Compare this drawing with /ɑ/: that one is far lower.
Word list
27 words grouped by where the sound sits in the word. Click a word to hear it. These are recorded as separate words, not cut out of the sentences above — a word cut from a sentence carries its neighbours' transitions and always sounds muddier. All three groups use the same speaker, so what changes between them is position, not voice.
Word-initial9
Word-medial9
Word-final9
Three groups of nine, split by syllable position: weak first syllable (about), weak middle syllable (computer), weak final syllable (sofa). Unstressed position is the only rule /ə/ has.
Corpus and acoustic measurements
Click any word in a sentence to play from that word. The pale band over the waveform marks the measured boundary of the target word.
Per-token data
Every number below is measured directly from the audio, not hand-annotated.
| Token | Accent | Sex | Target | Word length | ə duration | F0 | Pitch range | HNR |
|---|
Where the numbers come from
Every figure on this page can be recomputed from the description below.
Corpus: 12 English sentences synthesised with four American voices (two male, two female), each containing one target word, covering initial, medial and final positions. Audio is 22.05 kHz mono 64 kbps; each clip runs from 1.2 s before to 1.5 s after the target word.
Word boundaries: taken from the engine's word-level timestamps (WordBoundary) and corrected for the fixed offset between the engine timeline and the audio start (estimated per item). The target word is shaded in the waveform.
Phoneme boundaries: measured by forced alignment with the MMS_FA acoustic model. Each character's aligned frame range is kept, then a dynamic program maps the character sequence onto the phoneme sequence (th→θ, ng→ŋ, ck→k). Boundaries fall in the middle of the transition between characters; within-word coverage is 100%. Time precision is the model frame length, 20 ms, and boundaries are taken at midpoints, so effective resolution is about 10 ms.
Pitch: Praat's autocorrelation (to_pitch), 10 ms frame step, search range narrowed to the speaker's estimated range, octave errors removed. «Pitch range» is max minus min F0 within the word.
Why there are no paired differences here: this is a single-phoneme page. Eight other pages are contrast pages (θ/ð, l/r/n, vowel length) where the numbers come from paired words read by one speaker. A single-phoneme page has nothing to compare against — pairing it with a neighbour would measure that neighbour, which belongs to a different page.