Vowel in Creek, the letter "V" stands for . There is not necessarily a direct one-to-one correspondence between the vowel sounds of a language and the vowel letters. Many languages that use a form of the Latin alphabet have more vowel sounds than can be represented by the standard set of five vowel letters. In English spelling, the five letters "A" "E" "I" "O" and "U" can represent a variety of vowel sounds, while the letter "Y" frequently represents vowels (as in e.g., "gym", "happy", or the diphthongs in "cry", "thyme"); "W" is used in representing some diphthongs (as in "cow")
Stress and vowel reduction in English vowel. See weak vowel merger. This vowel is sometimes informally referred to as schwi in analogy with "schwa". The letter "a" is pronounced in many words, for example, "message" , "climate" , "orange" etc. Among speakers who make this distinction, the distributions of schwa and are quite variable, and in many cases the two are in free variation: the "i" in "decimal", for example, may be pronounced with either sound. A symbolization convention recently introduced by Oxford University Press for some of their English dictionaries uses the non-IPA "compound" symbol () in words that may be pronounced with either or