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xkcd #2907: Schwa
(imgs.xkcd.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Most English accents make a strong distinction between most of the voewls in that sentence. If you relentlessly turn everything to schwa, you get a cross between the aforementioned Forest Gump and "Ermagerd, shers".
Out of curiosity, what words does your accent pronounce without a schwa? Every single vowel sound in that is a schwa sound in those sentences sounds perfectly natural to me with a schwa sound.
/wɒts ʌp? wʌz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz bɹʌntʃ. nʌʔʌ dʌgz stʌk kɒz ɒv ə tʌnəl ɒbstɹʌkʃən. ə tɹʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn ɒv ʌnjənz. əχ./
Interestingly, "ʌ" is not used in many American linguistics sources, from Merriam Webster to Google Translate. In American English and many dialects of British English (and many others), there is little to no difference between 'ʌ' and 'ə.' I believe 'ʌ' is considered an allophone of 'ə,' which aren't always listed for vowel sounds in IPA.
The distinction is called the comma-strut split (referenced in the xkcd explainer), and occurs in a minority of English dialects apparently. I didn't realize Australian English was one of them! Cool.
For me it's more like
/wɒts ʌp? wɒz dʌg gənə kʌm? dʌg lʌvz bɹʌnʧ. nɜːʔɜː dʌgz stʌk kʌz ɒv ə tʌnəl əbstɹʌkʃən. ə tɹʌk dʌmpt ə tʌn ɒv ʌnjənz. əχ./
(Gimsonian, anyway, I like the newer, more logical style that would have nurse be /nəːs/)
I was putting the question mark because Tom Hanks affects a Mississippian accent, which would not necessarily pronounce all of these words with a schwa.
"Ermahgerd" uses two different vowel sounds, and that ɚ sound is slightly different than the examples in the xkcd, none of which are ɚ.
Given all three of these items--xkcd, Forrest Gump, and the meme--are from the United States, it makes sense to think of them in that dialect context.
I realize that you're Australian, so perhaps you wouldn't pronounce all these words with a schwa, but one of the defining features of the Australian accent is the abundance of schwas that are added in places that American English doesn't have it--notably at the end of words. Arguably Australian English actually uses the schwa more than Forrest Gump (or Randall) would.
It's also probably important to remember that the entire population of Australia is roughly equivalent to the metro area of New York City. As of 2022, there were roughly 400 million native English speakers in the world, of which roughly 306 million are in the United States, so I'm not sure about your "most English accents" comment either.
That said it's a very common second language, and at that level there would basically be innumerable accents, but it would be nearly impossible to analyze relative vowel variance across at that scale. So, maybe!