The other tricky thing about the schwa is that we often skip right over it! You know those “extra” vowels that hang around in words like chocolate, several, or different? Those center vowels disappear much of the time! It’s like the schwa got so lazy, it didn’t even show up! How to Identify the SchwaĪs with any “rule” in the English language, there are always exceptions. Instead of the long e or long a sound a beginning reader might predict, the sound actually comes out as a schwa: /uh/. Both are functional, so usually they are the unstressed words in sentences.
The lazy vowel sounds we make get pronounced as a schwa! Individual words also contain stressed and unstressed syllables, and we have a tendency to skip over, de-emphasize, and move quickly past the unstressed vowels. In general, the more important words of a sentence are stressed, and the less important “filler” or functional words like a, the, and, etc.) are unstressed. English is actually a very rhythmic language, with each sentence filled with stressed and unstressed syllables. The schwa basically sounds like /uh/… It’s a pretty lazy sound, like a soft, weak version of a short /u/, and what can be tricky about it is that any vowel can make a schwa sound.Ī lot of teachers struggle to understand and teach about the schwa, in large part because it’s less about the sound and more about the stress. So what is it, anyway? According to the Oxford Language Dictionary, it’s “the unstressed central vowel, represented by the /ə/ symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet.” It may be common, but it’s not always well understood by elementary teachers. “Schwa” is such a funny sounding word to describe what’s actually the most common vowel sound in the English language.
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