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 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