lochsh

I am an amateur linguist living in Oxford, UK. I love learning about phonetics and phonology, and I'm particularly interested Japanese and Gaelic.

I previously worked as a software engineer, writing Rust and Python for quantum computers, C++ for medical imaging diagnostics, and bare metal embedded C for surgical robots.

"The most common vowel in English"?

Mon 20 October 2025

[hʉz̥ ɪ̞̠̃ŋgɫɪ̞̠ʃ]?

Popular factoids about the English language often leave me feeling contrarian, as a native speaker of a variety of English often not included in these broad, unqualified statements. "English has no second person plural"? What do yous mean? And the seemingly ever popular: "schwa is the most common vowel in English".

This last statement has often left me puzzled, as I've never been able to confidently perceive this sound in my own speech. Is this a lack of skill, a misunderstanding, or is my phonemic intuition pointing at some truth about my English that can make me feel superiorly contrarian once again?

My English

In the Tom Scott video linked above (which you should watch if you don't know what "schwa" is) he says to the viewer "[when you name the letter "a"] you're actually making two separate vowel sounds, /eɪ/". A bold statement, because I say it with a monophthong: /e/.

Compare a Southern Standard British English recording of "face" [fɛjs]1:

to me saying "face" [fes]:

They sound quite different2, and you can see in the spectrogram (which shows frequency content over time) that the formants (the most prominent frequencies) of the SSBE vowel vary, but are very steady in mine:

face-formant-comparison

So where do you think I'm from? If you know much about accents of English then there are only a few options based on my pronunciation of "face" and my being a native speaker, and I don't think my being disgruntled by an English person incorrectly telling me how I speak does much to narrow it down. Here's a bit more of my speech, taken from my reading of "Comma Gets a Cure", before I tell you more:

"that itchy goose" [ðaʔ ɪ̞̠t͡ʃe gʉs]

And here's a clip from a voice note sent to some pals, for a sample of some more spontaneous speech:

That's right, I'm Scottish! But despite this being a post about my speech, I'm not going to share too many more clips, because I am shy, and because I don't want you to make a clone of my voice.

Here are some known and possible influences on my speech:

Any city has a wide range of speech, and I wouldn't say my speech is representative, but I would say it's not atypical of where I'm from3. I think living in England has undoubtedly changed my accent, which makes me sad, but it's still distinctively Scottish. I think any Irish influence is not phonetic, but shows up in some turns of phrase and syntax, like use of Hiberno-English "would"4 and "so"5. This is the main influence on my mother's speech also, though she also makes pulmonic ingressive sounds like the inhaled "yeah"s here.

Common transcriptions of schwa /ə/

There are a few places where SSBE and many American accents6 have schwa. Making reference to Wells' lexical sets:

So what about my English? Intuitively I can say:

I did some crude formant analysis11 comparing my vowels in the KIT, STRUT, and COMMA lexical sets, and weak forms of non-content words.

kit-strut-comma weak-forms

What I'm taking from this:

What about unstressed syllables in words like "villain" and "synthesis"? The passageI used for most of my analysis had very few incidences of these syllables12, so I recorded myself saying individual words13. There they are for your enjoyment and analysis:

These words, along with "woman" (from my passage reading), are plotted here against my KIT and STRUT vowels:

kit-strut-schwa

At last! A distinct schwa vowel. So it does exist! The outlier among the KIT vowels is "woman" which I pronounce with /ɪ/. In fact, many of the KIT examples I used were unstressed and would have been schwa in an accent with a complete weak vowel merger. But I'm not going to redo the analysis, I feel like it doesn't materially affect it.

With weak forms:

kit-strut-schwa-weak

And with COMMA:

kit-strut-comma-schwa

So in summary:

So, is schwa the most common vowel in my English? It certainly doesn't seem like it. In my reading of "Comma Gets a Cure", I think the only word I use a schwa in is in the second syllable of "millionaire". (See this footnote12.) One incidence in the entire passage doesn't sound like much to me! I think my having schwa only in some places in one of the many categories of syllables where schwa is usually pronounced results in this relatively rare incidence. Perhaps /ɪ/ is my most common vowel, on account of my using it for weak forms.

Superior contrarian feeling achieved 😌.

Appendix A: How mid-central is the vowel I've labelled "schwa"?

Something I haven't pointed out elsewhere in this post is that phonetic symbols and names like "schwa" have somewhat ambiguous and highly contextual meanings.

Take my KIT vowel, for example. I've seen vowel diagrams for Scottish English that put the KIT vowel much closer to schwa than the IPA chart shows [ɪ]. Similarly this "modern RP" vowel chart has a slightly lowered vowel.

Here they are superimposed, with the IPA's reference vowels shown in pink:

I-vowel-comparison

I'm not sure if this is an accurate plot of where my KIT vowel is, but it seems plausible.

There's an implicit assumption in my blog post that this difference between the IPA's definition of [ɪ] and my realisation of /ɪ/ is irrelevant to our discussions.

In a similar vein, when people repeat the meme of "schwa is the most common vowel in English", it can be unclear exactly what vowel they mean, and whether they are even aware of what they mean14. Do they mean any unstressed reduced vowel in their English? Specifically something in the near vicinity of the mid-central vowel on the IPA chart? Or just any sound they've seen transcribed as /ə/?

Anyway, here is me attempting a perfectly mid-central unrounded vowel, followed by my KIT vowel:

Formant analysis shows /ɪ/ with a slightly higher F1 and a more noticeably higher F2. This would make sense, as it would suggest a slightly less open, and noticeably more fronted vowel.

But how do the formants for my "perfect" mid-central vowel compare to the ones analysed in my speech?

perfect

Lol! It's hard to know if this is because my attempt at a phonetically perfect mid-central vowel was poor, or because the vowels I labelled schwa live somewhere else on the vowel chart. Regardless, using /ə/ to transcribe them is in keeping with tradition, particularly as they seem to contrast with my KIT vowel (which if it was my only mid-central vowel, you could argue would be sensibly transcribed as /ə/).

Appendix B: But what about, eeh, what's it called, "the hesitation vowel"?

Schwa is also sometimes called "the hesitation vowel", the vowel that English speakers use when they're trying to figure out what to say next. But I think I generally use my DRESS (or maybe FACE?) vowel if I'm going to make a vocalic hesitation noise while speaking, or maybe STRUT. Here are some examples taken from voice notes I sent friends:

/ɛ/

/ɛm/? /ɛrm/?

I think there's an idea that because the tongue position for schwa is "neutral", i.e. the tongue is at the mid-point of both the open-closed and front-back axes, that it's natural for speakers to default to it when reaching for what to say next.

I think what's natural is of course dependent on your native language(s). Take a look at these vowel diagrams for Arabic (three vowels), Japanese (five vowels), and Italian (seven vowels)15.

None of these show a schwa vowel. In Japanese it's most common to hear ええっと[e̞ːt̚to̞]16. The two vowels used there are both central, though they are front and back, respectively. My hesitation vowel is also mid. Is there something cross-linguistic at play here?

A brief look at this Reddit thread suggests some variation, but a lot of languages are listed as having mid vowel sounds, if I'm interpreting the crude transcription correctly: German, Kyrgyz, Finnish, Spanish. Notable exceptions appear to be Mandarin, Korean and Polish. This is quite a crude source of information however.

I love learning about phonetics and phonology: I love learning how speech sounds are made, about differences and similarities between the sounds of different languages, and how some differences in speech are immediately perceptible depending on context and your native language, and others are much harder to perceive.

I haven't posted on my blog in a while, and none of my previous posts have reflected this interest. I have a few fun ideas for projects and blog posts around these topics. Some of them are cross-language, some are specific to the second languages I am learning: Irish Gaelic and Japanese.

This post was my first try at posting about phonetics. If this is something you have expertise in, and you have any thoughts on my analysis, please do e-mail me at h@mcla.ug! I am not an expert and am very keen to learn.

  1. If you're interested in why I've used a different transcription to Tom Scott for the SSBE pronunciation of "face", I recommend this video from Geoff Lindsey ↩

  2. Mine is also shorter mostly because it is clipped from a longer utterance, whereas the SSBE recording is from a dictionary where the speaker has uttered a single word. ↩

  3. Apart from my pronuncation of words like "stair" with /ɛ/ instead of /e/. Compare my pronunciation of Sarah Perry [sɛɾʌ pʰɛɾe]:

    to my school pal's [seɾʌ pʰɛɾe].

    My mother's is similar to mine:

    In Wells' "Accents of English" he says: "There are some Scots who have /ɛr/ rather than /er/ in SQUARE: they will say upst[ɛː]rs, not upst[eː]rs. I have heard the claim that this pronuncation is used only by Roman Catholics in the Glasgow conurbation, and that it is due to Irish influence. I am not in a position to substantiate or disconfirm this claim." My mother is indeed from Glasgow and we are indeed Fenians. ↩

  4. Example: "I'd be a fan of that now" instead of "I am a fan". Or "she wouldn't be rich" instead of "she isn't rich". This feels natural to me, and I think I use it to indicate a certain subjectiveness or personal perspective. I do come across more objective usages that are less natural to me. Recently my cousin asked me "would you wear make-up". For the same meaning I would have said "do you wear make-up". So I wouldn't say I use it as broadly as people in Ireland. ↩

  5. Example: "I'll go do that then so", not really sure what meaning the "so" adds but I think I say this all the time. Looking this up, it seems it's common in Ireland to replace "then" with "so" in such phrases, so perhaps I'm doubling up! But this is what I say. I also say "ok so" but don't think I really say "ok then". ↩

  6. I don't know enough about American English accents to go into much detail about cultural and geographical factors that might affect the usage of schwa, despite being constantly subjected to American voices by media that I choose to consume of my own volition. I'm sorry if you are American and what I write here does not represent your accent. I have tried to make it clear that I am talking about some American accents and talking in broad terms of what dictionaries often transcribe things as. ↩

  7. Taken from the CUBE dictionary ↩

  8. I have read speakers from other areas have /fɪr/ for "fir". It's not like I've never met or heard anyone from outside the central belt! But not since I gained the sort of phonetic awareness that might cause me to notice this difference in pronunciation. ↩

  9. My STRUT vowel has definitely changed a bit from living in England. When I am chatting to my Scottish pals or speaking loudly (e.g. over a noisy pub), my vowel changes to (I think) further back and more open. ↩

  10. I haven't included any formant analysis for this set. It's harder to segment the vowels next to approximants, and I think some of my realisations are r-coloured vowels, which skews the F3 formant in a way that I think is distracting. ↩

  11. I manually segmented the vowels and used the default formant analysis in Praat's vocal toolkit. I visually inspected the spectrograms to ensure the formants looked sensible. Most of the tokens are from my reading of "Comma Gets a Cure". I conceived the vowel distance plots myself from my understanding that relative difference between formants was most important for perception, so if you're a linguist and have thoughts on their usefulness I'd be grateful. I think they match what is done in the Bark Difference metric described here, without cross-speaker normalisation (as it's just me speaking). ↩

  12. The words I picked out were: "woman" (two incidences, one of which had indistinct formants), "millionaire" (indistinct formants, perhaps due to pharyngealised /l/), "beautiful" (I have no intervening vowel between /f/ and /l/), "suffering" (I have no intervening vowel between /f/ and /r/). So only one usable token. In retrospect words like "private" could also have been used here, but as the CUBE dictionary transcribes it prɑjvɪt I had some impression that there was a difference between this and the other words. But I think it's just reflecting an incomplete weak vowel merger. I also use /ɪ/ in "private". ↩↩

  13. This is less desirable as there's always a chance I might self-consciously pronounce the words differently than normal, or just stating them in isolation might be different from saying them in connected speech. But I think the recording sounds very normal to me. ↩

  14. There are many linguists I respect, like Geoff Lindsey, who have said schwa is the most common vowel in English. I am not questioning whether he knows what he's talking about, more pointing out how much of a meme the "fact" has become, hence it is repeated without necessarily being understood. ↩

  15. All of these languages have "non-standard" varieties, where I'm sure the vowels vary significantly. Certainly there are varieties of Japanese with more or less vowels than shown here. My knowledge of Arabic and Italian is much less. ↩

  16. Japanese has a lot of "filler" words that are quite important parts of holding a conversation. I feel like ええっと or ええと or えっと is the best analogy for the places I would usually hestitate and go "eee" or "eem". One of the Reddit comments on the linked thread is about Japanese and lists some of these but I feel like only あの and ええと are used for unconscious hesitation, and the others are more expressive of specific sentiments. I would use あの more if I was shyly interrupting or about to say something I felt shy about, and えっと for stalling while I think of the next word to say. I am not a native speaker, however. ↩