Extra-short

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The International Phonetic Alphabet uses a breve, [  ̆], to indicate a speech sound (usually a vowel) with less than normal 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>.

See also length (phonetics).

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