Schwa

Schwa – The Lazy Sound

The word ‘schwa’ comes from Hebrew and children usually enjoy saying it. Schwa is related to the short vowel sounds because it can be spelled by any of them, including the semi-vowel ‘y’. I like to refer to it as the ‘lazy’ vowel cousin. You hardly open your mouth to create this vowel sound. The tongue, the lips and the jaw are relaxed. The schwa sound is represented by a /Ə/ in the Phonetic Alphabet (like an upside down ‘e’ or an ‘e’ too lazy to sit up!) It takes very little time to say in a word – so little that we, on occasion, lazily skip right over it when saying a word (e.g. the second ‘o’ in ‘chocolate’ or the first ‘e’ in ‘different’) or don’t even represent it when spelling (e.g. the vowel sound between ‘-th-‘ and ‘-m’ in ‘rhythm’).