Ə
Additional vocalic letter of the Latin alphabet / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the Latin letter. For the vowels represented by ⟨ə⟩ in IPA, see Mid central vowel. For the Cyrillic letter, see Schwa (Cyrillic).
Not to be confused with Ǝ.
Ə, or ə, also called schwa, is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), minuscule ə is used to represent the mid central vowel or a schwa.
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Quick Facts Schwa, Usage ...
Schwa | |
---|---|
Ə ə | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Latin script |
Type | alphabetic |
Phonetic usage | [æ] [ə] [ɨ] |
Unicode codepoint | U+018F, U+0259 |
History | |
Development | |
Time period | ~1922 to 1939, 1992 to present |
Descendants | • Ә |
Other | |
Writing direction | Left-to-right |
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. |
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It was invented by Johann Andreas Schmeller for the reduced vowel at the end of some German words and first used in his 1820s works on the Bavarian dialects.