Vowel reduction in English Totally Explained

Everything about Vowel Reduction In English totally explained

In English, vowel reduction is the centralization and weakening of an unstressed vowel, such as the characteristic change of many vowels at the ends of words to schwa. Stressed vowels can't be reduced.

Reduced vowels

Schwa is the most common reduced vowel in English, and orthographically it may be denoted by any of the vowel letters:

The a in about.
The e in synthesis.
The o in harmony.
The u in medium.

The following are also schwas, except in dialects that have two distinct reduced vowels (see below).

The i in decimal.

The y in syringe. Whereas the sound represented by the er in water is a schwa in non-rhotic accents like Received Pronunciation, in rhotic dialects like most of North American English, "er" designates an r-colored schwa, [ɚ], which is pronounced like schwa, except the tongue is pulled back in the mouth and "bunched up".
In some dialects of English there's a distinction between two vowel heights of reduced vowels, schwa and barred i, the near-close central unrounded vowel /ɪ̈/ (or equivalently /ɨ̞/), sometimes called "schwi". In the British phonetic tradition, this is written /ɪ/, and in the American tradition /ɨ/. (The OED has recently converted to /ɪ̵/.) An example of a minimal pair contrasting schwa and barred i:

The e in roses is a barred i

The a in Rosa’s is a schwa (See Phonological history of English high front vowels.) Many dialects also retain rounding in reduced vowels, with /uː/ and /ʊ/ reducing to [ʊ̈] (or equivalently /ʉ̞/; /ʊ̵/ in OED transcription), and /oʊ/ reducing to /ɵ/.
The other sounds that can serve as the peak of reduced syllables are the syllabic consonants. The consonants that can be syllabic in English are the nasals /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, and /l/ (actually a dark l). For example:

The m in prism is sometimes a syllabic /m/.

The on in button is a syllabic /n/ in dialects that pronounce 't' as a glottal stop.

The word and in the phrase lock and key in more rapid speech is sometimes pronounced as a syllabic /ŋ/.

The le in cycle and bottle is a syllablic /l/. These reduced vowels contrast in the word parallelepipedal, and in some dialects idler /ˈaɪdl̩ɚ/.
The vowels and diphthongs /ɔː/, /aʊ/, and /ɔɪ/ are never reduced, and all vowels may occur in unstressed position without reduction, especially in compound words. (These are often transcribed in dictionaries as having secondary stress, but that's a convention for unreduced vowels that occur after the primary stress. See secondary stress.) ť
Nonetheless, it's true that some vowels, such as /ɪ/ and /ʌ/, reduce quite readily, so that there are not many English words which have them in unstressed positions.

Alternation

Some English words alternate between having full but unstressed vowels and reduced vowels, depending on context. For example, the is typically /ðiː/ before a vowel-initial word (the apple) but /ðə/ before a consonant-initial word (the pear), though this distinction is being lost in the United States. Similarly with to: to America /tuː/ vs. to Britain /tə/. Most words, however, alternate depending on how much emphasis they're accorded. Some of these are:
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