Close-mid central unrounded vowel Close-mid central unrounded vowel The close-mid central unrounded vowel, or high-mid central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . This is a mirrored letter e, and should not be confused with the schwa , which is a turned e. It was added to the IPA in 1993; before that, this vowel was transcribed (Latin small letter e with umlaut, not Cyrillic small letter yo). Certain older sources transcribe this vowel . The letter may be used with a lowering diacritic ,
Near-open central vowel last two symbols are equivalent to the more complex symbols and , respectively. In some languages (such as Bengali, Cantonese or Cypriot Greek) it is the only open vowel, in place of the more common open central unrounded vowel. The near-open central rounded vowel is an extremely rare sound, reported to occur as a phoneme only in the Sabiny language. If its roundedness needs to be specified, it can be done by adding the more rounded diacritic to the near-open central vowel symbol: , by combining the lowered diacritic with the open-mid central rounded vowel symbol: , or by combining