Extra-short | |
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◌̆ | |
IPA number | 505 |
Encoding | |
Entity (decimal) | ̆ |
Unicode (hex) | U+0306 |
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The International Phonetic Alphabet uses a breve, [ ̆ ], to indicate a speech sound (usually a vowel) with less than normal', or 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 [pə̆liˑs]. This is typical of vowel reduction.
For typographic convenience, the breve is sometimes used for a non-syllabic vowel (that is, part of a diphthong), which is officially indicated by a similar diacritic placed under the vowel letter, as in eye [aɪ̯].
The breve is also sometimes used for flap consonants which do not have dedicated symbols in the IPA, since a flap is in effect a very brief plosive. However, the diacritic is normally found not on the symbols for plosives, as one might expect, but instead on approximants or fricatives such as ⟨w̆⟩, ⟨v̆⟩, or ⟨ʟ̆⟩.
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