Across languages, schwa vowels are commonly deleted in some instances such as in Hindi, North American English, French and Modern Hebrew. Sometimes, the term schwa can be used for any epenthetic vowel. In Albanian, Romanian, Slovene, Balearic Catalan, Mandarin and Afrikaans, schwa can occur in stressed or unstressed syllables.Ī similar sound is the short French unaccented ⟨e⟩, which is rounded and less central, more like an open-mid or close-mid front rounded vowel. In English, /ə/ is traditionally treated as a weak vowel that may occur only in unstressed syllables, but in accents with the STRUT– COMMA merger, such as Welsh English, some higher-prestige Northern England English, and some General American, it is merged with /ʌ/ and so /ə/ may then be considered to occur in stressed syllables. The name schwa and the symbol ⟨ ə⟩ may be used for some other unstressed and toneless neutral vowel, not necessarily mid central, as it is often used to represent reduced vowels in general. In English and some other languages, it usually represents the mid central vowel sound (rounded or unrounded), produced when the lips, tongue, and jaw are completely relaxed, such as the vowel sound of the ⟨ a⟩ in the English word about. In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa ( / ʃ w ɑː/ shwah, rarely / ʃ w ɔː/ shwaw or / ʃ v ɑː/ shvah sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol ⟨ ə⟩, placed in the central position of the vowel chart.