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).
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 [ə].[1][2] meanwhile in Pan-Nigerian alphabet pairs the same lowercase letter with Ǝ.
A superscript minuscule (U+1D4AᵊMODIFIER LETTER SMALL SCHWA) 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.
A schwa with a retroflex hook ⟨ᶕ⟩ is used in phonetic transcription.[3]
For gender neutrality in Italian
In the 2020s, the schwa has seen some usage in the Italian language, replacing the genderedsuffixes of the language, in order to keep words gender neutral.[4] For example, the use of the schwa in the word tuttə (all/everyone), as opposed to tutti (all/everyone, masculine plural).
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,[5] and the Accademia replied unfavorably to an initiative 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".[6]
In Windows, the characters can be generated by holding the ⎇ Alt 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 0.
With a Linuxcompose key, the lowercase letter is by default generated by Compose+e+e.