I have seen lately many questions related to the pronunciation of the schwa (ə) sound. Today, I again found this question, What exactly is the "schwa" sound?, at EL&U, so I wanted to ask how the 'schwa' sound is pronounced.
Answer
I believe that schwa (ə) is something a bit mysterious to many ELLs. The number of questions here, at EL&U, and around the web seems to indicate so. If you are learning English as a second language, and your language has no such concept as schwa, I hope my answer may help you a little.
If you look up words in dictionary, soon you will find this "inverted e" character, ə. Then you soon may come to learn that this strange-looking character is called schwa. Then soon, you may get confused because different dictionaries seem to transcribe this schwa sound differently. But more importantly, you usually find that native speakers do not pronounce those words exactly the same way they are written in dictionaries. Or at least, to you, it appears so. For example, from a question on our site:
The news caster pronounces ‘superior’ as /səˈpɪər i ər/. And I can find his pronunciation in the Random House Dictionary. But the other major dictionaries show /suːˈpɪriər/ or /sjuːˈpɪəriə/.
In spoken English, according to linguists and many researchers, when vowel sounds are sorted by number of occurrences, the schwa sound will be at the top of the chart, so it is very important for ELLs to learn how to hear and how to pronounce this schwa sound properly. (You can find an example of results of such researches here.)
My tips for dealing with the schwa sound in listening
Remember that many vowels in English, when being pronounced unstressed, will generally shift toward the center vowel, the schwa (ə).
Knowing which syllables and which words to stress is very important in spoken English. And, because the stress at word level is rather fixed, dictionaries usually transcribe the majority, if not all, of unstressed syllables as schwa (ə). (Actually, there are much more subtle details. For example, most modern dictionaries will also transcribe some of these unstressed syllables as /ɪ/, but that deserves a different question.)
Now you might wonder why I call "schwa" the center vowel.
The answer is because it is THE center vowel. Or, to be more technically precise, schwa is the mid-central vowel. If you look at the IPA chart below, you will see that the schwa sits exactly in the middle of the chart.
In English, when the sound of any other vowel is reduced to its weak form, the sound will be shifted toward this center sound, the schwa (ə) sound. (There are exceptions such as the short "i" sound (e.g. bit, spit) which is transcribed as /ɪ/ in dictionaries, or other unstressed syllables of what you may think they should be pronounced as /e/ or /i/ (e.g. the second syllable in helipad, or the first syllables believe) which will be pronounced as /ɪ/ rather than the schwa sound by some speakers.)
Most of unstressed vowels of function words (words such as the, to, on, can, and so on) will be reduced to a schwa. This is called weak forms. A good example of these weak forms is the word and. When it is fully pronounced (strong form), it will sound /ænd/. When it is unstressed (weak form), it will sound more like /(ə)n(d)/.
How to make this 'schwa' sound
I hope that the explanation above can help you to understand why schwa can sound like many sounds: it is exactly because it can be many sounds. You just have to think of schwa as something being reduced toward the center sound.
To make a schwa sound, you just need to reduce the sound of the vowel you think it is supposed to sound like, and reduce it a lot, to the point that it almost loses the quality of the original vowel you at first thought. For example, the first syllable of the word accord has the schwa sound. But many ELLs (including myself, once upon a time) think that it should be pronounced /ack-cord/, and found that when a native speaker says this word, it sounds nothing like /ack-cord/. It shouldn't sound /ack-cord/, of course, because it actually is /ə-kord/. To pronounce words with schwa sounds correctly, just remember to reduce the vowels by shifting them toward the center vowel, as much as you can.
This begs the question: how does this center vowel sound like?
Here is my trick to produce this center vowel.
First, start by having your mouth closed, but not tense. Relax your face. Relax your jaw. Relax your tongue. Just keep relaxing.
Then, open your mouth by dropping your jaw just a little, just enough to let your sound come out. Do not move your tongue. Your tongue should rest in your mouth relaxingly. Your tongue does nothing. Make sure that you don't open your mouth too wide, because that's when you say Ah! (the sound that your dentist will ask you to make). Do not force your muscles around your lips. Do not try to form your lips into any shape. Just keep relaxed.
Then, make a sound.
And, there you have it! That's your center vowel. That's your ideal schwa!
Just remember that your tongue has nothing to do with this sound. It should rest comfortably in your mouth. Do not lift it. Do not protrude it. Do not hold it backward. Do not curl it up. Your jaw also does nothing much. Do not tense it. Do not move it forward or backward. Just drop it gently. Just keep relaxing.
Remember to open your mouth only moderately. Open it too much and you will get a sort of /ah/ sound. Try not to force your lips into any shape. Round your lips too much and you will get a sort of /o/. Flatten your lips too much and you will get a sort of /i/ (letter E) sound. (If you look at the IPA chart, the /i/ sound is at the "close" position, and the /ah/ sound is at the "open" position. In fact, the vertical arrangement of the IPA chart is exactly in the inverted proportion to how much you open your mouth!)
This is a long post for me, but I hope it is useful to you. It may be a bit too long to read, but I hope that it is worth your time reading it. And, above all, I hope that it can help you find your own schwa sound.
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