Ə

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 system	Latin script
Type	Alphabetic
Language of origin	Azerbaijani language
Phonetic usage	[æ] [ə]
Unicode codepoint	U+018F, U+0259
History
Development	Ε ε ϵ 𐌄 E e Ə ə
Time period	~1922 to 1939, 1992 to present
Descendants	• Ә
Other
Writing direction	Left-to-Right

Ə ə, also called schwa, is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the Azerbaijani, Gottscheerish, Karay·a and Adyghe languages, and 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 the Pan-Nigerian alphabet pairs the same lowercase letter with Ǝ.

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 Karay·a alphabet, the letter represents /ə/.

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.

Unicode encodings

Character information

Preview	Ə		ə		ᵊ		ₔ
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SCHWA		LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA		MODIFIER LETTER SMALL SCHWA		LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER SCHWA
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex	dec	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	399	U+018F	601	U+0259	7498	U+1D4A	8340	U+2094
UTF-8	198 143	C6 8F	201 153	C9 99	225 181 138	E1 B5 8A	226 130 148	E2 82 94
Numeric character reference	Ə	Ə	ə	ə	ᵊ	ᵊ	ₔ	ₔ

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.