In
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
,
vowel reduction is the centralization and weakening of an
unstressed vowelIn English, vowel reduction is the centralization and weakening of an unstressed vowel, such as the characteristic change of many vowels at the ends of words to schwa. Stressed vowels are never reduced in English.-Reduced vowels :...
, such as the characteristic change of many vowels at the ends of words to
schwaIn linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
. Stressed vowels are never reduced in English.
Reduced vowels (schwas)
Vowel reduction is phonemic in English. That is, there are two "tiers" of vowels in English, full and reduced; traditionally many English dictionaries have attempted to mark the distinction by transcribing unstressed full vowels as having
"secondary" stressSecondary stress is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word; the stronger degree of stress is called 'primary'. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the stressed syllable: the nun in...
, though recently this has been abandoned in dictionaries such as the
Oxford English DictionaryThe Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press , is a comprehensive dictionary of the English language...
(OED) English has up to five reduced vowels, though this varies with dialect and speaker.
SchwaIn linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
is the most common, and orthographically it may be denoted by any of the vowel letters:
- The a in about.
- The e in synthesis.
- The o in harmony.
- The u in medium.
The following are also schwas, except in dialects that have two distinct reduced vowels (see below).
- The i in decimal.
- The y in syringe.
Whereas the sound represented by the er
in water is a schwa in
non-rhotic accentsEnglish pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: A rhotic speaker pronounces the letter R in hard and water. A non-rhotic speaker does not pronounce it in hard, and may not in water, or may only pronounce it in water if the following word begins with a vowel...
like
Received PronunciationReceived Pronunciation , also called the Queen's English and BBC English, is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional dialects similar to that of other European languages...
, in rhotic dialects like most of North American English, "er" designates an
r-coloredIn phonetics, vocalic r refers to the phenomenon of a rhotic segment such as or occurring as the syllable nucleus. This is a feature of a number of Slavic languages such as Czech, Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian, as well as some western Bulgarian dialects...
schwa, , which is pronounced like schwa, except the tongue is pulled back in the mouth and "bunched up".
Reduced front vowel (i-coloured schwa or schwi)
In some dialects of English there is a distinction between two vowel heights of reduced vowels, schwa and "schwi", the
near-close central unrounded vowelThe near-close central unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Alphabet can represent this sound as < > or < > . In many British dictionaries, this vowel has been transcribed , which captures its height; in the American tradition it is...
(or equivalently ). In the British phonetic tradition, this is written , and in the American tradition . (The OED has recently converted to .) An example of a
minimal pairIn phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have a distinct meaning...
contrasting schwa and schwi:
- The e in roses is a schwi
- The a in Rosa’s is a schwa
(See
Phonological history of English high front vowelsThe high front vowels of English have undergone a variety of changes over time, which may vary from dialect to dialect.-Weak vowel merger:The weak vowel merger is a phonemic merger of with unstressed in certain dialects of English...
.)
Rounded reduced vowel (u-coloured schwa or schwu)
Many dialects also retain rounding in reduced vowels, with and reducing to (or equivalently ; in OED transcription), as in into
, and reducing to , as in widow
. Bolinger (1989) cites a three-way contrast, a mission
, emission
, and omission
.
A word with all three schwas is (in OED transcription) beautifulness
.
Syllabic non-schwas
The other sounds that can serve as the peak of reduced syllables are the syllabic consonantA syllabic consonant is a consonant which either forms a syllable on its own, or is the nucleus of a syllable. The diacritic for this in the International Phonetic Alphabet is the under-stroke, , at Unicode code point U+0329...
s. The consonants that can be syllabic in English are the nasalsA nasal consonant is produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the lips or tongue...
, , , and (actually a dark l). For example:
m
in prism is sometimes a syllabic .
The on in prison is a syllabic .
The word and in the phrase lock and key in more rapid speech is sometimes pronounced as a syllabic .
The le in cycle and bottle is a syllablic .
These reduced vowels contrast in the word parallelepipedal
, and in some dialects idler .
The vowels and diphthongs , , and are never reduced, and all vowels may occur in unstressed position without reduction, especially in compound words. (These are often transcribed in dictionaries as having secondary stress, but that is a convention for unreduced vowels that occur after the primary stress. See
secondary stressSecondary stress is the weaker of two degrees of stress in the pronunciation of a word; the stronger degree of stress is called 'primary'. The International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for secondary stress is a short vertical line preceding and at the foot of the stressed syllable: the nun in...
.)
-
- {| class=wikitable
|+ Unstressed but unreduced vowels
! Vowel !! Example !! Pronunciation
|-
| || manatee ||
|-
| || chauvinism ||
|-
| || Monday ||
|-
| || enlist ||
|-
| || valet ||
|-
| || unknown ||
|-
| || grandma ||
|-
| || neon ||
|-
| || outlaw ||
|-
| || limo ||
|-
| || fulfill ||
|-
| || tofu ||
|-
| || discount ||
|-
| || idea ||
|-
| || royale ||
|}
Nonetheless, some vowels, such as and , reduce quite readily, so that there are few English words that have them in unstressed positions.
One of the effects of vowel reduction is the partial loss of voicing distinctions in preceding consonants. With a full vowel, as in manatee,
an unvoiced consonant is typically aspirated: . However, with a reduced vowel, as in humanity, aspiration is lost and the consonant may even become partially voiced. In American English, in the case of /t/, it may also be flapped: . According to , in the absence of
morphemeIn morpheme-based morphology, a ' is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning.In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes .The concept morpheme differs from the concept word, as many morphemes...
boundaries or
phonotacticalPhonotactics is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences by means of phonotactical constraints.Phonotactic constraints are language...
constraints, a consonant between a full and a reduced vowel generally belongs to the syllable with the full vowel, whereas a consonant between two reduced vowels belongs to the first syllable. According to this analysis, manatee
is and humanity
is ; voiceless plosives are only aspirated at the beginning of syllables, and /t/ can only be flapped at the end of a syllable: compare might I
→ and my tie
→ .
Alternation
Vowel reduction occurs with varying degrees of stability. In some words, an unstressed vowel is never reduced, and in some it is always reduced, but in a large number the extent of reduction depends on how quickly or carefully the speaker enunciates the word. For example, the o
in obscene
may be pronounced either as full or as reduced , but the historical o
sound in gallon
is never a full vowel, no matter how carefully one enunciates.
Many English grammatical (function) words alternate between having full but unstressed vowels and reduced vowels, depending on context. For example, the
is typically before a vowel-initial word (the apple
) but before a consonant-initial word (the pear
), though this distinction is being lost in the United States. Similarly with to
: to America
vs. to Britain
. Most words, however, alternate depending on how much emphasis they are accorded. When stress shifts to the word, the vowel must be full. Some of these are:
can
: I can go
, but you can?
and
: , but also you and me
,
he
: He will go
, but also will he go?
,
and so on with a, at, would, that, has, etc.
There are also a number of English verb-adjective pairs that are distinguished solely by vowel reduction. For example, in some dialects, separate as a verb (as in 'what separates nation from nation') has a full final vowel, , whereas the corresponding adjective (as in 'they sleep in separate rooms') has a reduced vowel: or .