Schwa deletion in Indo-Aryan languages

Schwa deletion, or schwa syncope, is a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in Assamese, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Gujarati, and several other Indo-Aryan languages with schwas that are implicit in their written scripts. Languages like Marathi and Maithili with increased influence from other languages through coming into contact with them—also show a similar phenomenon. Some schwas are obligatorily deleted in pronunciation even if the script suggests otherwise. Here, schwa refers to an inherent vowel in the respective abugida scripts, not necessarily pronounced as schwa (mid central vowel).

Schwa deletion is important for intelligibility and unaccented speech. It also presents a challenge to non-native speakers and speech synthesis software because the scripts, including Devanagari, do not indicate when schwas should be deleted.

For example, the Sanskrit word "Rāma" (IPA: [raːmɐ], राम) is pronounced "Rām" (IPA: [raːm], राम्) in Hindi. The schwa (ə) sound at the end of the word is deleted in Hindi. However, in both cases, the word is written राम.

The schwa is not deleted in ancient languages such as Sanskrit. The schwa is also retained in all the modern registers of the Dravidian languages Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam as well as the Indo-Aryan languages Odia and Sinhala. According to Masica (1993), there has been not "any attempt to deal with it [schwa deletion] (and medial vowel loss in general) in systematic fashion either descriptively or historically across all NIA [New Indo-Aryan] languages."