to anybody who thinks that the perfect youtube phonetics video doesn't exist, kindly direct them to this video. Thanks a lot for this gem!

Watching this has convinced me that I don’t understand my own English pronunciation.

I once considered entering linguistics as a career, but realised early on that it was more complicated than quantum physics, so became a computer programmer instead. This was an informative and very entertaining video! Vielen Dank, Herr Doktor Geoff!

This video just solved an eighteen-year-old mystery for me. When I was in fifth grade (mid-aughts, USA) we were given a series of homework assignments that I think were meant to improve our spelling by pointing out the diverse ways written English represents sound, and to get us to notice patterns so that we could work out the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. If I remember correctly, we'd get a list of words with, for example, the letter A in them (abbey, radio, daily, rapid) and were told to sort them into short-A and long-A. The last one, and the only one to use IPA notation in the instructions, was on /ə/ and /ʌ/. I had no idea what to do. All the words sounded the same to me. I think I got about half of them "wrong," at least as far as the textbook's answer key was concerned, and I never understood why. My teacher couldn't even explain the difference when I asked him.

Brilliant. I'm an American with a degree in linguistics and I'm pretty sure that every vowel chart I saw in school had ə/ʌ together and nearly smack-dab in the middle. There was no lower and backer for ʌ. Professors told me that schwa was the unstressed variant. I always thought, "Why bother?" There *are* stress marks in the IPA!

As a speaker of English as a second language who loves phonetics, this "distinction" had always confused me, but eventually I just accepted the convention of /ə/ being always unstressed and /ʌ/ being always stressed. This video is absolutely brilliant! The script, the editing with all those example clips and, of course, the humour. Your videos and your book, which I recently read, just make me want to learn more and more about phonetics. Please don't stop creating content!

The worst thing about phonemic transcriptions in dictionaries is that they try really hard to stay loyal to the phonetic distinctions of RP, but the symbols they use aren’t even accurate for modern RP. The sound usually represented by /ɔː/ is now pronounced more like [oː], while /ɒ/ ironically sounds closer to [ɔ]. Also, /uː/ is definitely [ʉː], /æ/ is more like [a], and /e/ is [ɛ] (Wikipedia actually acknowledges that last one in its pronunciation guides, so good on them). Even the whole business with /ʌ/ seems a bit fishy to me. I live in a largely RP-speaking area in the South East, and while I can hear the difference between it and the schwa, I’m fully convinced that it sounds nothing like [ʌ] and much more like [ɐ]. Unless my ears are completely deceiving me I guess…

I'm a native speaker of French, and this reminds me of the difficulties Parisians encounter with the distinction between the nasal vowels [ɛ̃] and [œ̃]. The distinction is much clearer in Quebec French, and even just in the southern regions of France.

As someone originally from Scotland, I can totally empathise with your confusion when you started uni. My dialect has no distinction between /u:/ and /ʊ/ (pronouncing both something like the Norwegian "u") and it used to confuse me no end when books (e.g. teaching German) would say that a given word was pronounced with "oo" as in "foot" and that another was pronounced similarly to the "oo" in "moon". But aren't they the same thing?! I only learned that they were different in RP and GA when I started teaching English. These days, I can hear the difference; but at first, I used to have to go in with a cheet sheet (for me!) when teaching this distinction in phonics clasees.

As a non-native English speaker who has learned to pronounce most words in the British way, I find it strange that these two sounds can be confused! I always thought they are totally distinct vowel sounds.

As a standard Australian speaker, I pronounce ʌ and ə differently - could be the RP influence, perhaps. ʌ is a shorter version of the 'ah' in father, while ə is an indistinct grunt that takes the place of all kinds of (yes, I confess) unstressed vowels. Loved the video!

In my dialect, (Toronto, Canada), These two phonemes are quite distinct. For me, the pronunciation of ʌ falls midway between my pronunciations of ə and ɒ. I feel like I’m making lexical errors when I force myself to pronounce ʌ as if it were ə.

Great video as always! The merger of /ə/ and /ʌ/ in many English dialects is a pain-point for many English speakers trying to learn Danish. In Danish, /ə/ and /ʌ/ are not only contrasted, but minimal pairs come up all the time. Take "spise" /spiːsə/ (eat, infinitive) vs. "spiser" /spiːsʌ/ (eating, present) or "kage" /ˈkaːjə/ (cake) vs. "kager" /ˈkaːjʌ/ (cakes). Luckily (for learners) schwa-assimilation - which many modern Danish accents do in casual/rapid speech - makes the distinction phonetically depend on other factors instead, which learners usually have an easier time picking up on. "spise" for example is usually phonetically realised as [ˈsb̥iː(i)s] in casual/rapid speech vs. "spiser" [ˈsb̥iːsʌ].

When I first learned about this, I was really puzzled, because having learned English as a native Finnish-speaker, we were told that ə is like Finnish ö, whereas ʌ is like Finnish (which of course isn't true), and this is how Finns spell them if they write English in a Finnish accent. Therefore, becomes , whereas becomes . I guess this is because we have RP-based English instruction, but it also affects how we perceive the American vowels, which we also hear more often than the RP ones.

I never realised (or even really thought about it), but I do have a contrast between ʌ and ə. I've been confused in some of your videos when you used schwa for two sounds that I thought were clearly different, but it makes a lot more sense now.

When I was in university, once a teacher asked me how to pronunce my name. I told her read the 'e' as ə. She seemed slightly surprised and said: oh -- it's a stressed schwa. I was keen to know more about that, but she was busy and didn't get any further in this topic. Now I got my explaination from you.

I LOVE this video and totally agree! UH is UH when it is stressed or unstressed. But people love phonetic transcriptions and leave me messages when they perceive that I am "wrong". Thanks for including me in the discussion. All the best and keep up the good work. Your videos are interesting.

I almost never laugh at comedy videos, I just find them funny without actually laughing. Your video made me laugh out loud. Thank you. It was the Nineteen Eighty-Four reference that got me, though the hallelujah and the desert of no reasons were hilarious as well. (EDIT: OK, the ending is the best part.) I had no idea Americans (and speakers of some other dialects) didn't have the ʌ sound. Fascinating! Thank you for being awesome and informing us about cool stuff that everybody ignores or denies. You are an inspiration. And I don't want to be a schwa anymore.

I’m from Belgium and I teach (British) English in Spain. The university entrance exams for English have one part all about pronunciation, and distinguishing between the two symbols/sounds presented in this video is actually a very common question. 😅

Dr. Lindsey, this is very interesting! I am American, and notice a clear difference in how I say /ʌ/ as in "strut" and /ə/ as in comma. I repeated several of the words you gave with those sounds and each was distinct every time. I would think my accent is General American but this is making me think that it might not truly be the case... I grew up in several different cities (Denver, Albuquerque, and NYC) so there are perhaps accent influences from those places that have led to this, but I'm not sure which ones are to blame!

You have no idea how much this video means to me. I wish we had had UKposts in 1970 when I started studying English in the university. I was born and brought up in the States, the family moved to Argentina when I was 11. I chose to study English but “British” [sic] phonetics was the rule. American English was shunned at the time. I had Argentine professors telling me that they would respect my native American (Midwestern) pronunciation but at the same time I always flunked Phonetics because of this mess with the schwa. I tried to explain to them what you are saying here but it was useless. Of course, I dropped out. (I led a happy life anyway but I’m wiping a tear. Thank you!)

I love your matter-of-fact objective approach to analyzing phonetics and phonemics. Sometimes I want to jump up and say, "Yay, I've been thinking that all along. Other times, I'm given something to ponder over at length. But I quickly learned never to dismiss what you say out of hand; turns out I usually end up agreeing with you after all. I'm American, so now I'm left to puzzle out whether I do or don't have different "uh" sounds. It's harder tha one would think!

My native languages are Italian and Neapolitan and I clearly perceive the distinction between the two phonemes, even when you pronounce them.

Thank you so much. You make so much more sense than anyone else I’ve talked to. In 1997, I was trying to teach a class of children in Taiwan. Here they use KK (Kastner Knott) which is very similar to the IPA. I grew up with Webster’s and learned about schwa in third grade. No one had talked to me about KK, and the special symbols, and I didn’t really know anything. My boss of the cram school was angry that I wrote the pronunciation guide wrongly. I was supposed to have looked up the correct pronunciation of my mother tongue before I taught the kids. I’ve learned since, but I’ll never forget how me transcribing my mother tongue was incorrect. Love your videos.

I subscribed immediately! I had initially ignored any contradictions I’d learned concerning these two symbols… until I started learning Korean and I found myself hyperfixated the pronunciation of the [ʌ]. Like many, I’d been taught that, for transcriptions, [ʌ] was stressed and [ə] was unstressed even though I never heard a difference in my pronunciation of these vowels. Additionally, when I’d pronounce them as transcribed, they would sound unnatural to me. But I excused this by simply coming to the conclusion that my professors must know something I don’t 😅 So then it took me by surprise when I would look up Korean IPA transcriptions and [ʌ] kept turning up everywhere, I kept thinking "this can’t be right" because my concept of what [ʌ] sounded like didn’t fit with how I knew the Korean word was actually pronounced It was this whole “thing" that really bothered me for a long time so thank you for this video 🙏🏼

Impeccable as always. I'd love to see a video about the infamous IPA vowels /ɑ, ɒ, ɔ/ and the cot- caught merger particularly in NAmE. As a non native speaker of English I perceive that the /ɒ/ sound is more common in NAmEng than in SSBE, despite what dictionaries say.

I'm so glad I'm not crazy. When I was doing transcriptions for class, I had the hardest time with these two "uh" sounds. Because of the "schwa is not stressed" rule, I would listen and think the answer is this one, but it ends being the other when I get my assignments graded.

So thankful for your work. It's save me from a hundred hours to find the different between them two, when all I need is the fluency. The more I try to find the difference the more iI confuse. And you make me smile so many time by your humorous. Such a comedy artist in your soul. Warm greeting from Vietnam.

Wow. As an Australian I cannot imagine pronouncing circumference or Columbus with the same vowel all the way through. To me, the 2nd syllable has a different vowel. I tried pronouncing these words with only schwa and It sounded bizarre. I don’t use schwa in strut at all. I have the same vowel in both syllables of above, but it is not schwa, but ^.

In my Australian English there's an obvious difference between ə and ʌ. "Done" and "the" have different vowel sounds, regardless of whether I stress the words or not.

Fascinating, as always. I wish your videos had been around when I was still teaching, but that was nearly 20 years ago. Thank you, too, for your phonetic synonym of "confusion". I didn't know it, but it's certainly expressive.

Dr. Lindsey. I'm overjoyed to have found your channel. Thank you for allowing that there are differences not only in pronunciation of dialects, but also academic-based biases and pre-conceived notions on what is considered "proper". On a constructive note, I find it immensely more helpful if you follow the same pattern each time of explaining what one will be hearing, and then playing the clip. Playing the clip and then explaining it without followup/repeat after the fact dulls the lesson and makes it difficult to take away the full impact of the example. Once again, many thanks for letting differences be okay.

In French schools, we are told that the vowel in 'strut', or 'uh', or any of these RP /ʌ/ when they come from a 'u' letter is pronounced as the french /ə/ (without even talking of phonetic or phonemes, it's just how the teachers say it, especially with younger children, to avoid complicating things too much). When later on I discovered that /ʌ/ existed I was mindblown because I had always thought (as i had been taught) that love was pronouced /lɔv/ (that's how you would read it with French pronounciation rules), and that in the word 'butter', it was twice the swcha sound... It turned out that according to RP, which is the accent that is mostly taught at high school, the same /ʌ/ is used for 'love' and for the first syllable of 'butter', but that the last syllable of 'butter' was something else. It made it quite hard for me to figure out how to pronounce /ʌ/, because i wanted to get something clearly distinct from /ɔ/ and /ə/, but trying to make it too different to a schwa sounded a bit off. Of course hearing multiple native speakers with various accents didn't help much because they can have different realisations of what would be /ʌ/ in RP, and because many would pronounce it /ə/ which I was conviced was wrong. It is mostly through listening to native speakers of England that I have managed to figure out how to distinguish /ə/ and /ʌ/ (both in listening and talking, but it was still quite an effort to pronounce). And this video just made me realise why it was such a struggle to find out what the English /ʌ/ really is, thanks.

I'm a native English speaker in Malaysia. I've never heard of ʌ-less English before. I've tried speaking out loud replacing the ʌ with a schwa and would like to testify that I did not sound like myself. "I had a tonne of buns" sounded like I was trying to say "I had a turn of burns". I don't think this disproves its insignificance in British or American English, but it's certainly not useless to distinguish it from schwas in English in some dialects.

Thank you Doctor, for bringing m to a better understanding to how we all speak. Having a Queens/LongIslandish accent and living on the west coast of the US I have had the fascination and opportunity to hear how English is pronounced in so many different ways. Beyond that I just like learning, thank you, and thank you for bringing me context.

Oh my goodness that tour-de-force of puns and references at the end had me in stitches! 🤣 It just kept going and kept getting better and better! And just when I thought that was it, it STILL kept going! 😂 I already greatly respected you and your channel but you just shot up another thousand points in my opinion!

Absolutely love those Handel sarcasms! So incredibly full of meaning. :D Brilliant video, as always.

Vowel sounds are fascinating. As a native Glaswegian, I definitely notice the difference between these two. But I'm also often amused by other words where they seem to be pronounced the same in England but notably different in Scotland (the stand out I think of is high, height... Where we pronounce height almost like a scouser would pronounce hate... And of course we pronounce hate differently again). It's lovely to watch a video of someone talking about vowel sounds and the functional mri of larynx was great too. Consider yourself liked and subscribed. I could listen to this type of content all day.

This has been my favorite video of yours so far. Great humor, and straight FACTS.

OMG It is amazing. I love this . I found your videos only about 30 minutes ago and I am so happy I did. xxx . I am Romanian so English is my second language and I've been trying for so long to find something like this. I am dealing with a lot of problems with Romanian teachers that I don't agree with about sounds, pronunciations, because many say they are not important and they throw ESOL at me. I am not a teacher, never finished a University but I kind of have some experience with English only because back in 1991 I left Romania for Hungary, Budapest and I had to learn Hungarian and English just talking with people cause I couldn't afford school xxx . Anyway, now I live in the UK, I've been living here since 2013 so a lot of my English has improved or so I think and hope

I have what I would consider a very standard American Accent (Northern California) and I pronounce the two vowels in each of these words differently from each other: consult stomach (stuh-mic) dumpster tulsa (tul sah) buzzard adult Also I pronounce the last schwa in circumference and comeuppance like a short i like in "pinch". I also noticed that I feel like any schwa sound preceding an "r" sounds like a totally different vowel sound to me. Hard for me to describe the difference between the vowels in consult and adult...maybe it's just the stress that's confusing me.

And I love your sense of humor about all of this. I grew up in the 60's. Schwa was never mentioned grades K through 12. College level English and linguistic courses were the only way to further expand all the rules. However, I'm not clear why some folks from Britain seem irritated that we don't speak British English. We are vastly different countries. And we are much too young as a country. We have loads of growing pains. Besides, we are basically 50 different countries in a complicated marriage. However, I do enjoy your lessons. I'm always eager to learn and appreciate the 'why' of things.

Thanks a lot Dr. Lindsey...for your MASTER classes. God bless YOU and your precious work and time. Regards from Trujillo- PERÚ...we are now in spring time but still chilly.

As a native American English speaker beginning to learn French, closing in on Dutch fluency, and continuing the arduous task of learning Mandarin, I find these videos extremely helpful to reflect on my native tongue. Merci beaucoup, dankjewel, and xie xie ni.

I think part of the confusion is that even in those accents (like my South Eastern English accent) that does have a strut schwa distinction they still sound similar. This is compounded by how for those with such a distinction, because that schwa sound is often on the unstressed syllables, it's often harder to listen out to that sound to see if it is different from any other given sound. I think this also raises some of the difficulties with how we teach the IPA. Often one of the easiest ways to learn a sound is to tie it back to a sound in a word that we use everyday. I instinctively know how to pronounce strut, so when learning ʌ I can tie it back to that sound. But of course vowel sounds can vary a lot from accent to accent, so whilst saying that ʌ is the vowel sound in strut is useful for me with my South Eastern English accent, it would not be useful for most Americans. This therefore creates difficulties in creating a universal key for such sounds. A solution would be to just make sure that people know what each sound is by the sound, and not by referring to a word which (for some) has that sound in it. But it can often be difficult to just learn sounds like that.

As an American, I'd never heard the idea that ə is never stressed. In my normal speech, that's the only sound I use, and I tend to use the Merriam-Webster dictionary, so I don't tend to see ʌ in pronunciation guides. After watching this video, I realized that I do sometimes use the ʌ sound when I sing. This is because my vocal coach was of the opinion that ə is not a very melodious sound. So I tend to replace ə with ʌ.

I've been watching some of your videos lately. Really informative and interesting! I'm no linguist but I find language to be a neat topic. As someone interested in herpetology, where people get very heated about how turtles are related to other reptiles or exactly how many species of rat snake there are -- it's also fun to see the 'controversies' in other fields.

Love the last minute and a half. It gave me a great chuckle :D PS I'm a native American speaker who is moderately obsessive about cultivating accurate yet natural-sounding pronunciation. For me, I find that it depends on the surrounding sounds. Some of my /ʌ/s certainly do come out as /ə/s, but I can come up with a good number of situations where they're clear /ʌ/s, too. Interesting stuff!

Finally, someone talks about this in a clear concise way! It's been driving me crazy for a while.

Ok two things. Born and raised in the states and I am just discovering this channel today and enjoying it. I must say I would definitely pronounce both vowel sounds in “double” quite differently. The first is a clear “uh” and the second is like to the u in “bull”. If I were a child I may spell it like “duhbull”. Also , before today, I would have said that the schwa sound in “strut” and “comma” were identical for me. And that’s the point you’re making which I’m sure for many people is likely true. And I COMPLETELY agree that how much you stress a sound should not be the determining factor in how you’d choose to spell it phonetically. Anyway, I noticed something when I quickly pronounced “Russia”. When I slowly enunciate each syllable individually, I say watch vowel exactly the same way- “RUH•SHUH”. But then when I said it quickly I realized the second vowel sound was more of a combination between the vowel in “buck” and “book”. In fact, when I think about it, I believe the sound is created by my entire mouth at its natural resting (but open) position. “Buck” requires me to lower my bottom jaw a bit. “Book” requires me to pucker my lips just a bit. But I notice when I say “Russia” after making the “sh” sound, I lower my tongue and my mouth is still as my throat moves to create that last sound. Wish I could comment with an audio recording. Hope this makes sense!

This is so so so good! Sovled a problem that confused me for many years!!!Thank you!

I need a little more persuading, but this is top shelf content and presentation. Congrats Mr. Lindsey

I'm an American, but I think I pronounce the two vowel sounds in "above" slightly differently, with the first one being somewhat higher (maybe [ɨ]?) That said, this isn't completely consistent, and I might sometimes pronounce them with the same vowel; I think they're definitely phonemically the same. Also note that this [ɨ] is mostly just word-initial. I think I somewhat disagree with the transcriptions from 6:11 to 6:50 on which words have schwa and which have KIT; I think I actually say "fung/ɪ/s", "undercurr/ɪ/nt", "Colomb/ɪ/s", "surrog/ɪ/te", "circumfer/ɪ/nce", "comeupp/ɪ/nce", "stom/ɪ/ch", "supplem/ɪ/nt", "Sulliv/ɪ/n", "buff/ɪ/tt", "Lond/ɪ/n", "rump/ɪ/s", and "governm/ɪ/nt."

Can't get enough of this channel, it's more exciting than the newest Netflix series. Incidentally, as I am seeing here that “unavailable videos are hidden”, I suppose the next video is already in the oven 👀

"No transcription without representation".... utterly hilarious! Watching an interesting video in its own right and then getting the bonus reward of that gem and a few others at the end made my day. I laughed aloud!

Brilliant illustration of your point at 9:14. Thanks for including it!

Brilliant! I've already shared that with my students! Thank you very much for creating such a valuable, critical and fun video! You even captured a part from "Hamilton". You're my pronunciation guru :) I'm waiting for more videos like that, best wishes. magda xxx

This is fascinating! I'm Canadian, with an accent that's adjacent to but not quite General American, and I... kinda distinguish between /ʌ/ and /ə/? I only really figured out that I had two different sounds there when pronouncing words that had both, and I think I'm pushing /ə/ slightly higher than normal when I do. It's also not always in the same places that RP uses them. But I would definitely say "bubblegum" has two stressed syllables with two different vowels!

The ending is a masterpiece... Thank you for yet another great video!

I have found your videos very helpful, and now I realise it isn't just because you explain everything so clearly, but also because your accent is similar to mine (I grew up in Chester). I wish I could work out how to even hear the upturned v vowel in RP! I certainly can't make it sound different from schwa when I speak.

this video was an interesting one to watch for me, as a North American who has a phonemic distinction between my STRUT and commA vowels. like you, i also created my own phonetic alphabet as a kid (which i still use today when i don’t want anyone to be able to read what i’m writing, haha), but mine had two different symbols for STRUT and commA, because i definitely internally think of those as being two different vowel sounds, and i at least think i pronounce them slightly differently. not sure why my own personal idiolect has this feature - the only thing i can think of is that it might have been partially influenced by the disproportionately high amount of British media i consumed in my early years (thanks to my Anglophile grandparents), but even that seems like a stretch. but anyway - i enjoyed the video, you’ve gained a subscriber :)

I really love your videos! Not only do you know a lot, but also manage to convey your knowledge in a clear and entertaining way, which I think is soo veery important for students ♥️ Not to mention all the many real-life examples, I really enjoy watching your videos! Just a thank you note from a Translation student in Argentina 😊 Oh, btw... Is it a common thing for natives to invent a personal phonetic alphabet? I loved that anecdote 😂

Did you seriously put the phonetic symbols for "cluster fuck" up there subliminally when you said confusion? I spit out my wine. You are both hilarious and educational.

One of the wittiest videos I've ever seen! All you need!

Awesome educational video, as a native speaker of NZE I had no idea this is how those dialects work! Your description of a phonetic alphabet you created as a child was very reminiscent of something I did, also before having access to the IPA, however I did something very different and gave the same symbol for KIT and the schwa vowel. Funnily enough, a word like comma would've been given the STRUT vowel, however only because these are both pronounced as [a] (with ə > a / _#)

dutch has the same problem with ʏ and ə you also see that many dutch children write ( when pronouced /ə/ ) as ( when pronounced )

I'm American, and I remember being very confused when I read some information about pronunciation symbols, when I was probably around 11 or 12 years old. I remember that the information I read made a distinction between the short u sound in words like "cut" and "run," and the schwa sound in unstressed syllables in many words. I remember thinking, "but they're exactly the same sound!" I thought maybe other people could hear some distinction that I couldn't. Thank you for making this video, which helps me to understand where my confusion came from!

That ending was brilliant! Cracked me up, along with the phonetic "clusterfuck" midway through. Great and informative video

It wasn't until 9:45 that I realized you weren't talking about beer at the beginning of the video

This drove me crazy when I studied linguistics. I eventually went with it because that's what professors wanted.

Before I watched this video, I thought it was going to be about a special type of schwa stress found only in certain dialects. Instead, I learned today that not only can the schwa be stressed, but I'm a schwa stresser too! My linguistics class did indeed make this distinction, and I could never hear it in my own speech so I took it on faith that there was some subtle difference when you stressed it. Turns out, nope, we just write stressed schwas as turned V's to seem more British! :O

Fantastic. Extremely helpful for understanding American. To me, as a natural RP speaker, the schwa is massively distinct from STRUT vowels, it never occurred to me anyone could mistake them. It's as strange as confusing a long vowel with a diphthong.

I'm in Ontario, Canada, and these sound district to me, at least when I try saying the words that have them different. Which is confusing me, because I didn't realize that I had this vowel distinction as different from standard American

Another great video, keep up the good work! Dr Lindsey. Not gonna lie, the intro to the video reminded me of myself scratching my head on the phonetic realization of the alleged "syllabic" consonants in Georgian and specifically in my idiolect, which turned out be a sequence of a short epethentic schwa and a succeeding sonorant and so a word like /vpʰɾtskʰvni/ would actually be pronounced as [fpʰə̆(ɾ)t͡skʰʊ̊ˈni] in my idiolect. by the way, in spoken Georgian, including my idiolect, the sonorants /ɾ m n l/ are often dropped when they occur in intercontinental positions, hence the brackets around the /ɾ/.

thank you, this video solved years of confusion for me. i always felt like the distinction between the vowels in AmE was dubious.

Not only informative and entertaining, but highly witty.

This video took me back to my 6th grade German class, learning to pronounce ö, ü and ä. We often burst out laughing because we felt so silly at the time! Now having lived here in Germany since 1985 it's second nature. Thanks for the memories, though!

Wow! That ending! All of this channel’s endings! Your videos, Dr Lindsey, always feel like an abstract and introspective sequence of a Gainax footage, like those last two episodes of _N. G. Evangelion_ or quite a few moments in _His and Her Circumstances._ Yeah, I’m talking of *ánimej* to an old-timer (in the American sense, what a word lol). As a(n) SSB English learner, I would like modernized IPA symbols for General American, as well. My brother, a GA learner, struggles a lot with the archaic symbols in his Anki deck. Something like *ɛ* instead of /e/ for DRESS, *i(j)* instead of /iː/ for FLEECE, *ej* instead of /eɪ/ for FACE, *ɐj* or *ʌj* i. o. /aɪ/ for PRICE, *oj* i. o. /ɔɪ/ for CHOICE, *ow* i. o. /oʊ/ for GOAT, *ə́r* i. o. /ɜːr/ or /ɝ/ for NURSE, *ɑ~ɒ* i. o. /ɔː/ for THOUGHT, *or* i. o. /ɔːr/ for NORTH; and above all, *ʉw* i. o. /uː/ for GOOSE. And all the _r-liaison vowels_ the same but without the schwas, no length mark, and obviously, with its rhotic *r.* I’m just a linguistics enthusiast and my mother tongue is not the English one, so what I say is potentially not one hundred percent accurate. Cheers!

I have subscribed, for your wit is as marvellous as your English. Thank you.

Heh! Your introductory clips had me confused there, practically shouting "they're not the same, listen to me say puff!" LOL Glad I stayed for you to hit the point, and it'd probably help me fit in a bit better if started using schwa in those positions :P (I am in Texas). Edit: For clarity and the curious, they are separate vowels for me, in the RP accent I learnt at school, and can switch back to fairly easily, even if my vocabulary is pretty radical (thanks to wide travel) compared to speakers who stayed closer to home.

In Serbian, the schwa is quite distinct from ʌ. The schwa is not even written as it is seen as the short essential sound made when joining 2 consonants. So “Serb” is written as “Srb”. I hear this vowel used a lot in New Zealand English, usually in place of “i” (the way they say “stick” would be transcribed phonetically in Serbian as “stk”). That’s very different from both “strut” and “comma” in my South African / Australian dialect. I definitely say “strʌt” and “commʌ”. However I do say “bərth”.

this is really interesting to me, as an american with an east coast accent, ʌ and ə sound distinctly different to me. my tongue is in a different place when i make them. more open, more back just like how the chart shows. now i'm really curious if other people who learned to speak near me do this too or if it's something i've picked up somewhere

I adored this video so much! First, a random thing, my brain almost exploded upon hearing "minimal pairs" -- I studied linguistics "back in the day" and haven't heard this term in decades. Allophones and phonemes...ah, fond memories of that required class "The Sounds of Human Suffering" uhhhh I meant "The Sounds of Human Language" (yeah, it had a rep as a really hard class). It seems these concepts were disfavored in later (more theoretical?) linguistics classes I took, but they are such useful concepts. Ahhhhhh and linguistic nonsense ("schwa, by definition, is never stressed," "you should use these two different IPA symbols for the same sound because one has the prosodic properties of a stressed vowel and one the properties of an unstressed vowel") drives me nuts and it was so very lovely to hear it all rationally and factually -- and politely but firmly -- debunked. I never knew the reason for it probably stems from importing a tradition of RP English transcription, illuminating. I am basically just gushing now, and I may have once said aloud, "I love this man." You know, or twice.

I only recently discovered the existence of this turned-v phenomenon,when i was building phonologies for some fictional languages... I was utterly baffled! I am now filled with gleeful joy to find that it's yet another fossilized class indicator! And I have never been able to replicate or distinguish the difference, until hearing that bit from Hamilton... Knowing that it's an RP thing makes it easier to hear. Now,about the way you pronounce "resources"... I've never heard a non-Canadian pronounce it that way... Could Merseyside be where that quirk came from?

In swedish the sound is somewhere between what we would call a short "A" and an "Ö" so I can often hear a difference between what is supposed to be an "uh", but wether it sounds more like A or Ö in my ears depends more on the particular english accent than wether it's stressed or unstressed.

This is really funny to me, because I'm a native speaker from New Jersey and I have a very marked contrast between the two sounds. When I learned about the existence of the schwa I didn't believe it at first, because in my ideolect they are certainly allophones, but upon further investigation I do indeed pronounce them differently, and it does in fact follow the rule that the "schwa is never stressed." Interestingly, in my head the schwa is *either* an allophone of small-caps-i ("ih") *or* turned-v ("uh") depending on the context. When I pronounce "lemon" or "motion" it feels more like an allophone of "ih," and when I pronounce "comma" or "against" it feels more like an allophone of "uh." And in some words, I have both phenomena (e.g "elephant" > "el(uh)f(ih)nt"); bizarre, huh? Though, given the fact that I pronounce the schwa like a weaker intermediary between the two sounds proper, it does make sense. In "undone," I pronounce both vowels with a turned v, and in my thinking, this is precisely because the first u gets a secondary stress. So no, at least for me, the Emperor is wearing quite a fine robe, and my eyes are not mistaken, and I'd rather you quit making accusations about his supposed nudity. /s

I just love the one with the close-up of the mouth where she makes the same sound but louder. Genius!

Such good information here and so well put across. Thank you 🙏

I love videos that point out phemonena I would never notice otherwise. I speak American English and I differentiate comma and strut, as well as most of the other words shown here, though my vowels have a lot in common with Canadian English so I wonder if that is a contributing factor.

As an RP speaker, I certainly differentiate between the vowel that starts "annul" (~the schwa~) and the one in the syllable that ends it (and starts "umbrella"). Some internal gymnastics are required for their alternation. I also draw a distinction between the vowel in "up" and the one in "harp" (or "card" and "bud" from your chart), but those two can be made without moving a muscle - the only difference is the length (u is truncated). This is a surprising revelation to a lot of English speakers and many won't believe it. The proof is to _sing_ words like "sum" and "psalm", "bum" and "balm" etc. at the same pitch, extending the vowel. The victim won't know, themself, which they're singing! ;) I love the X-ray segments btw!

Absolutely terrific! Thank you.

Interesting video, a benefit of trying several foreign languages is you come across sounds that you or your exchange partner struggle to distinguish. The International English course I took part in MADE a clear distinction between the strut vowel and schwa, as markers between native and typical ESL speech and their habitual vowel positioning. Myself I had issues with hearing subtle differences in Norwegian vowels which are significant to meaning. But I have found Spanish listeners struggle with un/voiced consonants so ice and eyes aren't distinguished without training effort.

I've always wondered, do RP speakers not intuitively consider the shwa to be the unstressed allophone of the NURSE vowel? I can't explain why, but I feel like I have, through the years, perceived through off hand comments here and there from RP speakers that that's how they subconsciously think of it.

In American English (AE), "schwa" represents two distinct things. [1] The specific sound written /ə/ which is similar to /ʌ/, and [2] a "reduced" vowel. AE speakers reduce many unstressed vowels -- but they don't pronounce them all /ʌ/. Instead, they make a variety of sounds. The whole point is that these reduced vowels are NOT pronounced precisely. Sadly, many AE dictionaries use /ə/ to represent this, as if it was a single sound. So foreigners attempt to produce that vowel sound, even though native speakers do not do so.

I ran into this video because the video game Tunic has a written phoneme based language that folks can optionally translate to find greater depth in the world. This has introduced a lot of people to the world of phenomes, and thus to the /ə/ and /ʌ/ similarity. Interesting stuff!

I know absolutely nothing about linguistics but I feel like I learned something! Thanks, your videos are really interesting!

Brilliant video; I lol’d several times. I’ll make sure to recommend this video and your channel to my phonology students! (Btw, your general argument applies to Canadian English, it seems, except that some conservative speakers distinguish ʌ and ə before ɹ, e.g. currant /ˈkʌɹǝnt/ vs. current /ˈkəɹǝnt/)

As a native Romanian speaker, I can clearly hear the difference between the two, as /ʌ/ is much more strongly associated with /a/ (written a), while /ə/ is it's own category (written ă). Interestingly, I can also clearly hear a difference in your speech, even if your /ʌ/ is closer to /ə/, and you may not perceive a difference. I've also heard speakers of some American accents merge them fully, but not all of them, as in any piece of American English media I can hear the distinction for most participants. I think the reason is that near merger occurs by first fronting the vowel, instead of closing it, in which case, I would call it close enough to an /ə/.

This is a great video. While they are certainly allophones of the same phoeneme, as a Southern Ohioan studying Linguistics in Michigan - meaning all my classmates and most of my teachers had Northern Cities Shift. I did not, and had the low back merger besides. Because I could hear a difference in the way I pronounced the vowel and the way the other students pronounced the vowel, I used to always transcribe my own speech with a /ʌ/ and that of my classmates as /ə/. Since I was also the only student in the class using /ɔ/, this made perfect sense to me at the time. Looking back, I suspect I was fooled by the fact that I also had a naturally deeper voice than my classmates as regards my quite possibly false distinguishment of /ʌ/ v /ə/. I need to look up some different example pairs, though, because I still hear a difference in the way I pronounce the vowel in strut and comma, but I have a feeling that's because I end strut with a glottal stop, not a /t/ and am fronting the /ə/ in comma.

this is a major relief for me being non-native but really self conscious about pronunciation, i thought my realization of the strut phoneme was an artifact of being more used to the schwa sound from catalan