It’s actually a syllabic L, which is often spelled out as a schwa in pronunciation dictionaries.
If you speak German, an equivalent would be the -en on most unconjugated verbs. Haben is pronounced with a syllabic n (or m, depending on your accent), for example.
The difference is basically in length. A syllabic consonant is shorter than even a short vowel sound, and which vowel it uses depends on the language. It’s a schwa in English because that’s basically our default vowel, as you pointed out, but not every language uses a schwa as the syllabic consonant carrier: Serbo-Croatian uses [u].
It’s actually a syllabic L, which is often spelled out as a schwa in pronunciation dictionaries.
If you speak German, an equivalent would be the -en on most unconjugated verbs. Haben is pronounced with a syllabic n (or m, depending on your accent), for example.
The difference is basically in length. A syllabic consonant is shorter than even a short vowel sound, and which vowel it uses depends on the language. It’s a schwa in English because that’s basically our default vowel, as you pointed out, but not every language uses a schwa as the syllabic consonant carrier: Serbo-Croatian uses [u].