Ə

Ə, orə, also calledschwa, is an additionalletterof theLatin alphabet. In theInternational Phonetic Alphabet(IPA), minusculeəis used to represent themid central vowelor a schwa.
It was invented byJohann Andreas Schmellerfor the reduced vowel at the end of some German words and first used in his 1820s works on theBavarian dialects.
It is or was used in several languages around the world, including theAzerbaijani,Gottscheerish,Karay·aandAdyghelanguages, theAbenaki languageof Quebec, and in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ dialect ofHalkomelem. Both themajusculeandminusculeforms of this letter are based on the form of a turnede, while inBalineseit is not written formally but the final orthographic-ais a schwa [ə] and sometimes represented byǎletter.meanwhile inPan-Nigerian alphabetpairs the same lowercase letter withƎ.
A superscript minuscule (U+1D4AᵊMODIFIER LETTER SMALL SCHWA) is used to modify the preceding consonant to have a mid central vowel release, though it is also commonly used to indicate possiblesyllabicityof the followingsonorant, especially in transcriptions of English. The latter usage is non-standard.
In theAzerbaijani alphabet,⟨Ə⟩represents thenear-open front unrounded vowel,/æ/, like the pronunciation of⟨a⟩in "cat". The letter was used in the 1992ChechenLatin alphabet proposal where it represented theglottal stop,/ʔ/, like the pronunciation of⟨tt⟩inGA"button". It was also used in theUniform Turkic Alphabet, for example inJanaliffor theTatar languagein the 1920s–1930s. Also, in a romanization ofPashto, the letter⟨Ə⟩is used to represent[ə]. When some Roman orthographies in the Soviet Union were converted to use theCyrillic scriptin the 1930s and 1940s,this letterhas been adoptedverbatim.
In theKaray·aalphabet, the letter represents/ə/.
In the Latin transliteration ofAvestan, the corresponding long vowel is written as schwa-macron,⟨Ə̄ ə̄⟩.
AnR-colored vowelcan be represented using⟨ɚ⟩.
A schwa with a retroflex hook⟨ᶕ⟩is used in phonetic transcription.
In the 2020s, the schwa has been proposed to replace thegenderedsuffixesof theItalian language, in order to keep wordsgender neutral: for example, the use of the schwa in the wordtuttə(all/everyone), as opposed totutti(all/everyone, used both as a masculine plural and as a plural without gender marking).
This niche usage is controversial—as well as mainly limited to written language, as there is no real consensus on how the-əsuffix should be pronounced—and has been criticized by theAccademia della Crusca. The president of the Accademia opposed its use,and the Accademia answered to a question posed by the Equal Opportunities Committee of the Supreme Court of Cassation for the introduction of the schwa in juridical language, stating that "juridical language is not the place to experiment with minority-led innovations that would lead to irregularity and idiolects".
Since the legacy fixed 8-bitISO/IEC Turkish encodingcontains neitherƏnorə,Ä ähas sometimes been used for theAzerbaijani languageinstead, as in theTatarandTurkmen languages.
In Windows, the characters can be generated by holding the⎇ Altkey and pressing the respective decimal Unicode number, which can be found in the table (e.g. 399, 601), on the number pad preceded by a leading0. 
With aLinuxcompose key, the lowercase letter is by default generated byCompose+e+e.