&gt; Overstressed vowels: A lot of the time, people are lazy about pronouncing certain vowels—they’re un-emphasized and neutral, and just sort of hang loosely in the middle of the mouth, making an “euh” sound, regardless of which vowel it actually is.<p>Here&#x27;s a funny notion. Perhaps in modern American English (at least the midwest accent), perhaps many of the vowels have <i>actually</i> become schwas and it&#x27;s only the historic nature of the orthography that makes us think they should be something else. There&#x27;s no vowel that sounds like the schwa naturally, but it&#x27;s clearly a &quot;missing&quot; letter in the modern alphabet since it&#x27;s also the most common vowel sound in American English. So every other vowel ends up being pronounceable as a schwa in various contexts.<p>Strangely, most people who use the schwa vowel regularly make a specific point to pronounce other key marker vowels correctly in order to distinguish the words, the rest of the vowels are unimportant to distinguish.<p>Imagine how much better English orthography would be if we could just use an &#x27;ə&#x27; everyplace an unstressed vowel existed.