How well do you schwa?
Even if you don’g know what that means, I’m willing to be you already hear the schwa sound whenever you listen to English speakers. And once you hear it, there’s no escape; this sound is everywhere.
“Do you want a banana?” a friend asks, and you hear it; a weird UH that isn’t quite an A or an E sound, but somewhere right in between. Worse, it can prove extremely difficult to recreate if you don’t have the right jaw and tongue position. But without it, your English won’t get that nice, common accent that helps you communicate.
What can you do?
Schwa in American English
Schwa is a term used in phonetics to refer to a neutral vowel sound that is pronounced with the tongue in a relaxed position. It is the most common vowel sound in English, and it is represented by the symbol /ə/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
It’s the ‘uh’ sound you make as you relax after a long, hard day.
In English, the schwa sound is often found in unstressed syllables, particularly in the middle of words. The word “banana” has two schwa sounds, one in the second syllable and one in the third syllable. If you listen to a native speaker pronounce the word, you’ll hear the slight difference. Listen to these examples a few times and see if you can spot it.
How to use this sound
If you study English, you likely hear a big difference between how Americans pronounce words versus the audio files in your lessons or your language teacher. That’s because native speakers tend to reduce or even pass right by it as they speak. However, they don’t do this intentionally. Americans, like a lot of English speakers, prefer fast pronunciations and that makes them prone to shrinking words down in conversation.
Unfortunately for non-native speakers, that makes picking up the proper pronunciation extremely difficult. And this reduced, forgotten, yet somehow important sound is everywhere.
Let’s look at one example; auxiliary verbs.
These verbs: Do, Have, To be, and Will, help other verbs become past tense or take on the passive voice. If you say, “You didn’t go to the store yesterday,” the the verb DO helps the verb GO become past tense. And the schwa sound lives in the second syllable of the word “didn’t.” Here’s the pronunciation breakdown: dɪd.ənt
There she is, that little ə right before the ‘n’. Now, listen to how some different people pronounce it and see if you can hear how little they say the schwa sound.
Practice the schwa sound
Start by listening to others and try to spot how they reduce or skip over it.
