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 ,
Stress and vowel reduction in English word, such as "react" . For some speakers, however, there is a contrast between this vowel and in such pairs as "taxis" vs. "taxes" and "studied" vs. "studded". See English phonology – vowels in unstressed syllables. According to , there is a reduced rounded phoneme as in "willow" , "omission" , thus forming a three-way contrast with "Willa" and "Willie" or with "a mission" and "emission" . This vowel is sometimes informally referred to as schwu in analogy with "schwa". Analogously to the symbol mentioned above, Oxford University Press have devised the non-IPA symbol to represent a vowel that may