Ə

Ə ə, also called schwa, is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the Azerbaijani language, in Gottscheerish, and in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ dialect of Halkomelem. Both the majuscule and minuscule forms of this letter are based on the form of an upside down e, while the Pan-Nigerian alphabet pairs the same lowercase letter with Ǝ.

This article is about the Latin-derived letter. For the vowel represented by ə in IPA, see Mid central vowel. For the Cyrillic letter, see Schwa (Cyrillic).
Schwa
Ə ə
Usage
Writing systemLatin script
TypeAlphabetic
Language of originAzerbaijani language
Phonetic usage[æ]
[ə]
Unicode valueU+018F, U+0259
History
Development
Time period~1922 to 1939, 1992 to present
Descendants • Ә
Other

In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), minuscule ə is used to represent the mid central vowel or a schwa. A superscript minuscule ᵊ 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.

In the Azerbaijani alphabet, Ə represents the near-open front unrounded vowel, /æ/. The letter was used in the 1992 Chechen Latin alphabet proposal where it represented the glottal stop, /ʔ/. It was also used in the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, for example in Janalif for the Tatar language in the 1920s–1930s. Also, in a romanization of Pashto, the letter Ə is used to represent [ə]. When some Roman orthographies in the Soviet Union were converted to use the Cyrillic script in the 1930s and 1940s, this letter has been adopted verbatim.

In the Latin transliteration of Avestan, the corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron, Ə̄/ə̄.

An r-colored vowel can be represented using ɚ.

A schwa with a retroflex hook (ᶕ) is used in phonetic transcription.[1]

Unicode encodings
CharacterƏəᵊₔ
Unicode nameLATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCHWALATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWAMODIFIER LETTER SMALL SCHWALATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER SCHWA
Encodingsdecimalhexdecimalhexdecimalhexdecimalhex
Unicode399U+018F601U+02597498U+1D4A8340U+2094
UTF-8198 143C6 8F201 153C9 99225 181 138E1 B5 8A226 130 148E2 82 94
Numeric character referenceƏƏəəᵊᵊₔₔ

Since the legacy fixed 8-bit ISO/IEC Turkish encoding does neither contain Ə nor ə, Ä ä has sometimes been used for the Azerbaijani language instead, as in the Tatar and Turkmen languages.

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 Linux compose key, the lowercase letter is by default generated by Compose+e+e. In OS X with the U.S. Extended keyboard, the letters Ə ə are made with ⌥ Option+⇧ Shift+: followed by ⇧ Shift+A or a respectively.

References
  1. Constable, Peter (2004-04-19). "L2/04-132 Proposal to add additional phonetic characters to the UCS" (PDF).
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