The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses a breve ⟨ ˘ ⟩ to indicate a speech sound (usually a vowel) with extra-short duration. That is, [ă] is a very short vowel with the quality of [a]. An example from English is the short schwa of the word police [pə̆ˈliˑs].[1] This is typical of vowel reduction.
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| Extra-short | |
|---|---|
| ◌̆ | |
| IPA Number | 505 |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | ̆ |
| Unicode (hex) | U+0306 |
Before the 1989 Kiel Convention, the breve was used for a non-syllabic vowel (that is, part of a diphthong), which is now indicated by an inverted breve placed under the vowel letter, as in eye [aɪ̯]. It is also sometimes used for any flap consonants missing dedicated symbols in the IPA, since a flap is in effect a very brief stop.
References
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