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This article is about the Latin-derived letter. For the vowel represented by ə in IPA, see Mid central vowel. For the Cyrillic letter, see Schwa (Cyrillic).
Ə ə
Ə ə

Ə ə, also called Schwa is an additional letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the Azerbaijani language. Both the majuscule and minuscule forms of this letter are based on the rotated form of a minuscule e.

The letter was used in the Uniform Turkic Alphabet, for example, in Janalif for the Tatar language in the 1920s-1930s. In the Latin Azerbaijani and Chechen alphabets, Ə represents the near-open front unrounded vowel, /æ/.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, minuscule ə is used to represent the mid central vowel or a schwa. Also, in a romanization of Pashto, the letter Ə is used to represent [ə].

In the Latin transliteration of Avestan, the corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron, Ə̄/ə̄.

Unicode encodings[edit]

Character Ə ə
Encodings decimal hex decimal hex
Unicode 399 U+018F 601 U+0259
UTF-8 198 143 C6 8F 201 153 C9 99
Numeric character reference &#399; &#x18F; &#601; &#x259;

When using ə in Unicode, the Azerbaijani language has problems with the ISO/IEC Turkish encoding, so sometimes ä has been used instead, as in the Tatar language and Turkmen language.

In Windows, the uppercase "Ə" can be generated by holding the Alt key and pressing 399 on the number pad, and the lowercase "ə" with Alt + 601. With the GNOME desktop environment, it is by default generated by Compose + e + e.

In MacOS with the U.S. Extended keyboard, the letters Ə ə are made with Option-Shift-: followed by A a respectively.


See also[edit]