Vowel reduction
In phonology, changes in the acoustic quality of sounds which are perceived as "weakening". / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about phonetic reduction, which means a change in pronunciation. For the meaning in phonology, see Phonemic merger.
In phonetics, vowel reduction is any of various changes in the acoustic quality of vowels as a result of changes in stress, sonority, duration, loudness, articulation, or position in the word (e.g. for the Creek language[1]), and which are perceived as "weakening". It most often makes the vowels shorter as well.
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.
Vowels which have undergone vowel reduction may be called reduced or weak. In contrast, an unreduced vowel may be described as full or strong. The prototypical reduced vowel in English is schwa. In Australian English, that is the only reduced vowel, though other dialects have additional ones.