Editing Stress (linguistics) (section)

== Stress and vowel reduction ==
In many languages, such as [[Russian phonology|Russian]] and [[English phonology|English]], [[vowel reduction]] may occur when a vowel changes from a stressed to an unstressed position. In English, unstressed vowels may reduce to [[schwa]]-like vowels, though the details vary with dialect (see [[stress and vowel reduction in English]]). The effect may be dependent on lexical stress (for example, the unstressed first syllable of the word ''photographer'' contains a schwa {{IPAc-en|f|ə|ˈ|t|ɒ|ɡ|r|ə|f|ər}}, whereas the stressed first syllable of ''photograph'' does not {{IPA|/ˈfoʊtəˌɡræf -ɡrɑːf/}}), or on prosodic stress (for example, the word ''of'' is pronounced with a schwa when it is unstressed within a sentence, but not when it is stressed).

Many other languages, such as [[Spoken Finnish|Finnish]] and the mainstream dialects of [[Spanish language|Spanish]], do not have unstressed vowel reduction; in these languages vowels in unstressed syllables have nearly the same quality as those in stressed syllables.