Close central unrounded vowel: Encyclopedia II - Close central unrounded vowel - Occurs in

Close central unrounded vowel - Occurs in

• Amharic: /bɨčča/ "only" (often transcribed as ə)
• Guaraní: yvy /ɨʋɨ/ "earth"
• Polish: my [mɨ] "we"
• Romanian: înspre [ɨnspre] "toward"
• Russian: вы [vɨ] "you" (plural form, or formal)
• Sirionó: /esí/ "dry wood"
• certain dialects and sociolects of Swedish: vi [vɨ] "we"

Close central unrounded vowel - English

For some dialects of English that distinguish between two reduced vowels, barred-i is used to transcribe the closer of the two vowels; the more open reduced vowel is transcribed with ə (schwa). For example, in those dialects that distinguish the words "roses" and "Rosa's", the sound of the 'e' in roses is [ɨ] and the sound of the 'a' in Rosa's is [ə] . Some transcription schemes use [ɪ] (the symbol for the near-close near-front unrounded vowel as in big ([bɪg])) for this vowel, but [ɨ] is used by those who prefer to keep the set of symbols used to transcribe reduced vowels separate from the symbols used to transcribe stressable vowels—the advantage being that if the reduced vowels are considered as distinct phonemes from the unreduced vowels, many words do not need to have stress placement explicitly marked in the lexicon. The actual phonetic quality of the reduced vowels can vary widely throughout the vowel space defined by [ɨ] and [ɪ], so neither symbol can be regarded as "more correct" on any basis other than tradition.

The symbol ɨ is also occasionally used to transcribe the unstressed vowel of English belly, when that vowel is analysed as a phoneme on its own (sometimes called schwi), in order to show that it is neither long /i/ nor lax /ɪ/. Schwi is not pronounced as a close central unrounded vowel, but is a short [i] or [ɪ], depending on dialect or idiolect.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Occurs in", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki