ə

Ə, or ə, is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet. It is also called schwa, from another name for the mid central vowel, the sound represented by minuscule ə in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

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.

Usage

It is or was used in several languages around the world, including the Azerbaijani, Gottscheerish, Karay·a and Adyghe languages, the Abenaki language of Quebec, and in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ dialect of Halkomelem. Both the majuscule and minuscule forms of this letter are based on the form of a turned '' e'', while in Balinese it is not written formally but the final orthographic ''-a'' is a schwa �and sometimes represented by ''ǎ'' letter. Meanwhile the Pan-Nigerian alphabet pairs the same lowercase letter with Ǝ.

A superscript minuscule () is used to modify the preceding consonant to have a mid central vowel release, though it is also commonly used to indicate possible syllabicity of the following sonorant, especially in transcriptions of English. The latter usage is non-standard.

In the Azerbaijani alphabet, represents the near-open front unrounded vowel, , like the pronunciation of in "cat". The letter was used in the 1992 Chechen Latin alphabet proposal where it represented the glottal stop, , like the pronunciation of in GA "button". It was also used in the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, for example in Janalif for the Tatar language in the 1920s–1930s. Also, in a romanization of Pashto, the letter is used to represent . When some Roman orthographies in the Soviet Union were converted to use the Cyrillic script in the 1930s and 1940s, this letter has been adopted verbatim.

In the Karay·a alphabet, the letter represents .

In the Latin transliteration of Avestan, the corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron, .

An R-colored vowel can be represented using .

A schwa with a retroflex hook is used in phonetic transcription.

For gender neutrality in Italian

In the 2020s, the schwa has been proposed to replace the gendered suffixes of the Italian language, in order to keep words gender neutral: for example, the use of the schwa in the word (all/everyone), as opposed to (all/everyone, used both as a masculine plural and as a plural without gender marking).

This niche usage is controversial—as well as mainly limited to written language, as there is no real consensus on how the ''-ə'' suffix should be pronounced—and has been criticized by the Accademia della Crusca. The president of the Accademia opposed its use, and the Accademia answered to a question posed by the Equal Opportunities Committee of the Supreme Court of Cassation for the introduction of the schwa in juridical language, stating that "juridical language is not the place to experiment with minority-led innovations that would lead to irregularity and idiolects".

Unicode encodings

Since the legacy fixed 8-bit ISO/IEC Turkish encoding contains neither ''Ə'' nor ''ə'', '' Ä ä'' has sometimes been used for the Azerbaijani language instead, as in the Tatar and Turkmen languages.

In Windows, the characters can be generated by holding the key and pressing the respective decimal Unicode number, which can be found in the table (e.g. 399, 601), on the number pad preceded by a leading .
With a Linux compose key, the lowercase letter is by default generated by .

References

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Latin-script letters
Phonetic transcription symbols
Azerbaijani language