Schwa: What It Is, How It’s Pronounced, and How It’s Used (Why It’s Still Debated)

Following a growing interest in the topic from newspapers, social media, and public opinion, beginning around the years 2019-2020 it has become increasingly common to encounter textual content in which an inverted “e” appears, namely the schwa (ə), which in academic contexts was first introduced by Luca Boschetto in a 2015 article.

Regarding its uses, but especially its connotations, its meanings and its limits, the debate has already been lively for some time, which has contributed to making the “schwa issue” often thorny and divisive.

To orient ourselves on this topic and understand in more detail what we are talking about, here is a brief but synthetic outline aimed at shedding light on what the schwa is, what characteristics it has, and how it has been inserted into the broader and central discussion concerning questions of gender and linguistic inclusivity in Italian…

What is the schwa? History and characteristics

Let us start with the fundamentals: when we talk about the schwa, in linguistics we refer to a mid, unrounded vowel sound that is used daily in certain parts of the world and that, in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), is conventionally represented by the symbol “ə”.

In other words, it is typically a vowel characterized by a sound that sits midway between the other existing vowels, whose pronunciation has been well known for centuries to millions of speakers, and which can be found within languages such as English or French, as well as in certain Central and Southern Italian dialects like Neapolitan, Barese, or Sicilian.

Its name, derived from the medieval Hebrew shav, could mean nothing, while according to other linguistic theories it is more plausible that its meaning is synonymous with equal, or par. Be that as it may, identifying it with the symbol of a short vowel was first proposed by Johann Andreas Schmeller (1785-1852) in the 19th century, who linked it to an invented symbol of the Latin alphabet.

Subsequently, it was adopted by the phonetics scholar Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890), who used it to identify an indistinct vowel in the English language, while the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) suggested that a similar indistinct vowel existed already in Proto-Indo-European, later evolving into many different vowels in languages spoken across our continent today.

Finally, at the turn between the 19th and 20th centuries, the schwa established itself in the IPA we mentioned above, becoming essential in academic contexts and settling in Italian mainly as lo schwa, a masculine noun, although a sizeable portion of the population (especially in Italian-speaking Switzerland) tends to say la schwa for the feminine form.

How do you pronounce it?

And now we come to one of the questions that is asked most often: how is the schwa pronounced? In this regard, there are two possible answers. If we refer to the term schwa itself, the correct pronunciation is scevà, in light of the etymology discussed above.

If, instead, we want to understand how to pronounce the schwa inside a word, rather than relying on our own regional dialects or foreign languages, we can keep in mind a simple principle: the schwa is not pronounced at all.

In other words, we should imagine that, in its place, there is a white space, a kind of “lift” between syllables — or between one word and the next — without forcing ourselves to attach it to a specific sound. It is a bit like when, instead of reading the Italian alphabet by leaning on the letter “i,” we pronounce the consonants as bare and unaccented: b, d, p, t (and not bi, di, pi, ti) and so on.

This should make the task easier, guiding us automatically to fill the space after each letter with a neutral sound, without emphasis or tone, of low sonority: a true schwa in every respect, which will thus render the word in which it is inserted as slurred.

An alternative to the asterisk?

Alongside the possibility of using the schwa there is also the option of using the asterisk (*), which in recent years has begun to replace the slash (/) used to couple masculine and feminine endings in order to avoid a long two-form expression, especially in bureaucratic texts (writing signori/e instead of signori e signore).

The schwa and the asterisk would, at first glance, serve the same function in the same way, although the asterisk generally raises more doubts. The reason is well explained by the Accademia della Crusca in a passage from the article Un asterisco sul genere:

The asterisk […] serves to highlight something, for example a name or a term in a list, marking it with respect to the others. The asterisk can also indicate a note (especially if isolated) or, more often repeated two or three times, denote a deliberate omission by the author, particularly of a proper noun […]. A somewhat analogous use is found in comics and online, where asterisks or other signs (at-sign, hash, period) replace the internal letters of curses, thereby censoring them.

In other words, the asterisk is a somewhat more familiar graphic sign and, in some respects, might appear more reassuring, but it is also true that it is already widely used in written texts and is commonly assigned a variety of functions.

The proposal to opt for the schwa would therefore be motivated by the aim of avoiding misunderstandings and overlaps of meaning, thus attempting to delimit the scope of the asterisk while entrusting the schwa with a more specific and unequivocal task. Which one? Let us now examine it in detail.

The schwa in contemporary debate…

Having clarified the main doubts about the schwa, we can now take a closer look at the role it has assumed in discussions in recent years – one of the latest debates arose in spring 2025, when the Ministry of Education and Merit issued a circular advising schools to ban asterisks and schwa in official documents.

To better understand the context, it is important to start from the premise that more and more demands for gender equality and LGBTQIA+ rights also come from how we relate to the language we speak in our daily lives.

After all, many culturally rooted habits in our speech signal a particular way of thinking, of conceiving the world, and of instinctively relating to those around us, just as some of the most well-known and authoritative voices in international linguistics have stressed for centuries.

Consequently, those who do not view with favor the patriarchal legacy that Italian use encourages—that is, using the masculine as if it were neuter, referring by default to a person not specifically identified as male, or speaking in the masculine for a mixed-gender group—have begun proposing more inclusive alternatives.

To avoid marking gender and to respect everyone’s identity, without imposing preferences a priori or privileging one category over another according to an intersectional perspective, it has been proposed to borrow the schwa from the International Phonetic Alphabet to graphically and phonetically indicate an unmarked word (as in other languages already with the asterisk, the at sign, the x, or the u).

A position that has found support not only within sociolinguistics but also among intellectuals and influencers, businesses and publishing houses, agreeing with the idea that Italian is a living language in constant evolution, to reflect society more faithfully and to strip away inequalities and formal biases (often a sign of a deeper problem than mere form).

Not a few key figures in our country have nonetheless voiced their doubts about the topic, among which four of the most argued and widespread will be recalled here. The first consists of a critique of its inclusivity, since the schwa is not immediately decipherable by screen readers for the visually impaired or by dyslexic readers, turning a parity attempt into a new form of selective exclusion.

The second concerns more the realm of poetry, as one wonders how it might function in terms of syllable counting and rhyme schemes if an element like the schwa is inserted, particularly in poetic translations from foreign languages which themselves inflect masculine and feminine forms.

While the third point touches more on SEO indexing of online texts, noting that at present a behemoth like Google treats the terms signore, signora, and signorǝ as distinct and separate keywords, each associated with a different search volume and cost per click, raising several questions for those who want to use the schwa more consistently while also positioning themselves effectively.

Lastly, a certain difficulty arises from choosing the root to use in terms where the masculine and feminine forms differ partially, as in moderator and moderatrice, since so far it is very common to find the form moderatorə, a form that seems to lean somewhat toward the masculine.

Naturally, it must be reiterated that this is an open issue, where there aren’t necessarily univocal and immutable positions; indeed: those who advocate for the use of the schwa may acknowledge its limits and intend to overcome them or to find an even more appropriate alternative, while those with a more skeptical view can still agree with some favorable arguments and willingly embrace a linguistic and cultural change at a fundamental level.

…and in the era of Artificial Intelligence

Ever since Artificial Intelligence has partly transformed our relationship with the digital ecosystem and with the creation or post-production of content, the schwa issue has begun to attract growing interest from increasingly diverse professional groups and users worldwide.

The reason is straightforward: the Large Language Models of major tech companies are trained by ingesting enormous amounts of unfiltered textual data from newspapers, books, social media, forums, and information sites (with often controversial implications in terms of fake news, online traffic, copyright, authorship, and the ownership of intellectual works).

As a result, AI absorbs language statistically according to how humans have predominantly used it over time, and it retains and reiterates in its outputs the biases, the inequalities, and the stereotypes embedded in our societies, ranging from racial and religious to gender-related biases.

A particularly hot topic in a context like Italy (and in Romance languages more generally) where the masculine continues to be largely regarded as the unmarked grammatical gender, leading models to accumulate a vast number of masculine endings in databases and making it less likely for AI to automatically generate a more symmetric or inclusive formulation.

Not to mention that precisely the schwa and the asterisk are among the most difficult characters for artificial intelligence to process correctly, since they interrupt the standard structure of words and are often misread as a typo or as a special symbol to ignore—at least until a research and development team trains and corrects the AI retroactively, applying directives or mathematical filters that remain subject to the approval (and to the sensitivity) of the parent company.

This is a problem that increasingly concerns educational and academic institutions, now more oriented toward turning AI from an obstacle into an ally against gender discrimination.

How so? On one side, for example, by providing guidelines for AI use aimed at promoting linguistically inclusive teaching — a direction already pursued by Sanoma, a large Finnish-origin group and a leader in school publishing and education, which in March 2026 published several suggestion sheets for those who want to accompany teacher planning, the construction of learning materials, or the work of classes toward “new, often useful possibilities,” and oriented toward greater awareness on the matter.

Or, on the other hand, by creating from the outset datasets that respect diversity, so as to re-train the machine-learning algorithms from a more equitable perspective.

Pioneering in this regard is E-Mimic (Empowering Multilingual Inclusive comMunICation), the project in linguistics and data science funded by the Ministry of University and Research and developed by Politecnico di Torino, Università di Bologna, and Università di Roma Tor Vergata, which has led to the development of an algorithm called Inclusively, which will be first accessible to the public administration.

Its objective, as explained by the project’s coordinator, Tania Cerquitelli, in the official statement, is to provide “an assistive writing interface that scans documents to identify fragments of text that lack inclusivity,” leveraging “generative modeling to reformulate these portions of text in a way that is gender-neutral and aligned with the defined inclusive criteria.”

With the hope that the innovation will be used to expand (rather than limit) the human capacity to “interpret, govern and valorize the complexity of language.”

Examples of schwa usage

Car Tar¹,

you mustn’t be sad because there aren’t any, otherwise I’ll become sad too. And besides, you have the other kids, dad and mom, our room, friends, the Wise Ones as always… What should I do, since I’m here only among these Earthlings who are so strange and different from us? Yet I must admit they do everything to make me feel at home. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s not possible, but it’s not their fault. But you must not start thinking that I’m unhappy and abandoned here. Above all, don’t tell Dad. After all, it was I who wanted to come to Earth. And I have fun here, with many new things.

¹Note for Terrans. This is not a printer’s error. The letter — like all the others written by Mo to his/her later reported — has been translated from Denebian. A language that provides, for children under 50, gender-neutral pronouns and adjectives. In Italian there is no neuter, so — to avoid making you think that at this point Mo assigns one of the two genders to himself or to Tar — we have removed the final letter from all the adjectives that refer to them.

The passage presented here is taken from the novel Extraterrestrarre on Equal Terms (Einaudi ragazzi), which the renowned Sardinian author Bianca Pitzorno published for the first time in 1979: the schwa was not yet present, but the function it serves today did exist then.

The impetus for reflection proposed by the text concerns the need to go beyond prejudices during the process of growing up, establishing who we are and who we identify as beyond conventions, grids, or prepackaged rules that external forces might impose. This is why we can identify in Bianca Pitzorno’s note a good ante litteram example of how to use the schwa today, with or without AI.

That is, speaking of a person whose gender identity we do not know, or who we know does not identify with the male–female binary, using nouns, adjectives, and past participles in the singular that feature a schwa instead of the final -a or -o, or in the plural instead of the -e and -i endings when we face a varied group of people whom we do not wish to define using the so-called “overextended masculine” or “universal masculine” (e.g., A group of professors to refer to both male and female teachers).

Example: – Where did you go yesterday evening?
– I attended a bookstore presentation. We weren’t that many, but I was struck that one ragazzə joined me on a topic proposed by moderatorə who has always been very dear to me.