In
articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a
speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the
vocal tract
The vocal tract is the cavity in human bodies and in animals where the sound produced at the sound source ( larynx in mammals; syrinx in birds) is filtered.
In birds it consists of the trachea, the syrinx, the oral cavity, the upper part of th ...
. Examples are and
pronounced with the lips; and
pronounced with the front of the tongue; and
pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; ,
and , pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (
fricative
A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
s); and and , which have air flowing through the nose (
nasal
Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination:
* With reference to the human nose:
** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery
* ...
s). Contrasting with consonants are
vowels.
Since the number of speech sounds in the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one
alphabet,
linguists have devised systems such as the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous
symbol to each attested consonant. The
English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so
digraphs like , , , and are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled in "this" is a different consonant from the sound in "thin". (In the IPA, these are and , respectively.)
Etymology
The word ''consonant'' comes from
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
oblique stem , from 'sounding-together', a
calque
In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language ...
of
Greek (plural , ).
Dionysius Thrax
Dionysius Thrax ( grc-gre, Διονύσιος ὁ Θρᾷξ ''Dionýsios ho Thrâix'', 170–90 BC) was a Greek grammarian and a pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace. He was long considered to be the author of the earliest grammatical text on the Gr ...
calls consonants ( 'sounded with') because in Greek they can only be pronounced with a vowel. He divides them into two subcategories: ( 'half-sounded'), which are the
continuants, and ( 'unsounded'), which correspond to
plosives
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), li ...
.
This description does not apply to some languages, such as the
Salishan languages, in which plosives may occur without vowels (see
Nuxalk), and the modern concept of 'consonant' does not require co-occurrence with a vowel.
Consonant ''sounds'' and consonant ''letters''
The word ''consonant'' may be used ambiguously for both speech sounds and the
letters of the alphabet
A letter is a segmental symbol of a phonemic writing system. The inventory of all letters forms an alphabet. Letters broadly correspond to phonemes in the spoken form of the language, although there is rarely a consistent and exact correspondenc ...
used to write them. In English, these letters are
B,
C,
D,
F,
G,
J,
K,
L,
M,
N,
P,
Q,
S,
T,
V,
X,
Z and often
H,
R,
W,
Y.
In
English orthography
English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, ...
, the letters H, R, W, Y and the digraph GH are used for both consonants and vowels. For instance, the letter Y stands for the consonant/semi-vowel in ''yoke'', the vowel in ''myth'', the vowel in ''funny'', the diphthong in ''sky'', and forms several digraphs for other diphthongs, such as ''say, boy, key''. Similarly, R commonly indicates or modifies a vowel in
non-rhotic accents.
This article is concerned with consonant sounds, however they are written.
Consonants versus vowels
Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a
syllable: The most sonorous part of the syllable (that is, the part that's easiest to sing), called the ''syllabic peak'' or ''
nucleus
Nucleus ( : nuclei) is a Latin word for the seed inside a fruit. It most often refers to:
* Atomic nucleus, the very dense central region of an atom
*Cell nucleus, a central organelle of a eukaryotic cell, containing most of the cell's DNA
Nucl ...
,'' is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins (called the ''
onset'' and ''
coda
Coda or CODA may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Films
* Movie coda, a post-credits scene
* ''Coda'' (1987 film), an Australian horror film about a serial killer, made for television
*''Coda'', a 2017 American experimental film from Na ...
'') are typically consonants. Such syllables may be abbreviated CV, V, and CVC, where C stands for consonant and V stands for vowel. This can be argued to be the only pattern found in most of the world's languages, and perhaps the primary pattern in all of them. However, the distinction between consonant and vowel is not always clear cut: there are syllabic consonants and non-syllabic vowels in many of the world's languages.
One blurry area is in segments variously called ''
semivowels'', ''semiconsonants'', or ''glides''. On one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form
diphthongs as part of the syllable nucleus, as the ''i'' in English ''boil'' . On the other, there are
approximants that behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the ''y'' in English ''yes'' . Some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel , so that the English word ''bit'' would
phonemically be , ''beet'' would be , and ''yield'' would be phonemically . Likewise, ''foot'' would be , ''food'' would be , ''wood'' would be , and ''wooed'' would be . However, there is a (perhaps allophonic) difference in articulation between these segments, with the in ''yes'' and ''yield'' and the of ''wooed'' having more constriction and a more definite place of articulation than the in ''boil'' or ''bit'' or the of ''foot''.
The other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying the nucleus of a syllable. This may be the case for words such as ''church'' in
rhotic dialects of English, although phoneticians differ in whether they consider this to be a syllabic consonant, , or a rhotic vowel, : Some distinguish an approximant that corresponds to a vowel , for ''rural'' as or ; others see these as a single phoneme, .
Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in
Czech and several languages in
Democratic Republic of the Congo, and
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...
, including
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language ...
. In Mandarin, they are historically allophones of , and spelled that way in
Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson
call these "fricative vowels" and say that "they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels". That is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels.
Many
Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei (see
Words without vowels
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
). In languages like
Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of 'syllable' applies in Nuxalk, there are syllabic consonants in words like (?) 'seal fat'.
Miyako in Japan is similar, with 'to build' and 'to pull'.
Features
Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic ''
features
Feature may refer to:
Computing
* Feature (CAD), could be a hole, pocket, or notch
* Feature (computer vision), could be an edge, corner or blob
* Feature (software design) is an intentional distinguishing characteristic of a software ite ...
'':
* The
manner of articulation is how air escapes from the vocal tract when the consonant or
approximant (vowel-like) sound is made. Manners include stops, fricatives, and nasals.
* The
place of articulation is where in the vocal tract the obstruction of the consonant occurs, and which speech organs are involved. Places include
bilabial (both lips),
alveolar (tongue against the gum ridge), and
velar (tongue against soft palate). In addition, there may be a simultaneous narrowing at another place of articulation, such as
palatalisation or
pharyngealisation
Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound.
IPA symbols
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, pharyngealization can be indicated b ...
. Consonants with two simultaneous places of articulation are said to be
coarticulated.
* The
phonation of a consonant is how the
vocal cords vibrate during the articulation. When the vocal cords vibrate fully, the consonant is called
voiced; when they do not vibrate at all, it is
voiceless.
* The
voice onset time (VOT) indicates the timing of the phonation.
Aspiration is a feature of VOT.
* The
airstream mechanism is how the air moving through the vocal tract is powered. Most languages have exclusively
pulmonic egressive consonants, which use the lungs and diaphragm, but
ejectives,
clicks, and
implosives use different mechanisms.
* The
length is how long the obstruction of a consonant lasts. This feature is borderline distinctive in English, as in "wholly" vs. "holy" , but cases are limited to morpheme boundaries. Unrelated roots are differentiated in various languages such as Italian, Japanese, and Finnish, with two length levels, "single" and "
geminate".
Estonian
Estonian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe
* Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent
* Estonian language
* Estonian cuisine
* Estonian culture
See also
*
...
and some
Sami languages have three phonemic lengths: short, geminate, and long geminate, although the distinction between the geminate and overlong geminate includes suprasegmental features.
* The articulatory force is how much muscular energy is involved. This has been proposed many times, but no distinction relying exclusively on force has ever been demonstrated.
All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop" . In this case, the airstream mechanism is omitted.
Some pairs of consonants like ''p::b'', ''t::d'' are sometimes called
fortis and lenis, but this is a
phonological rather than phonetic distinction.
Consonants are scheduled by their features in a number of IPA charts:
Examples
The recently extinct
Ubykh language had only 2 or 3 vowels but 84 consonants; the
Taa language
Taa , also known as ǃXóõ (also spelled ǃKhong and ǃXoon; ), is a Tuu language notable for its large number of phonemes, perhaps the largest in the world. It is also notable for having perhaps the heaviest functional load of click conson ...
has 87 consonants under
one analysis, 164 under
another, plus some 30 vowels and tone. The types of consonants used in various languages are by no means universal. For instance, nearly all
Australian languages lack fricatives; a large percentage of the world's languages lack voiced stops such as , , as phonemes, though they may appear phonetically. Most languages, however, do include one or more fricatives, with being the most common, and a
liquid consonant or two, with the most common. The approximant is also widespread, and virtually all languages have one or more
nasals, though a very few, such as the Central dialect of
Rotokas, lack even these. This last language has the smallest number of consonants in the world, with just six.
Most common
The most frequent consonants in rhotic American English (that is, the ones appearing most frequently during speech) are . ( is less common in non-rhotic accents.)
The most frequent consonant in many other languages is .
The most universal consonants around the world (that is, the ones appearing in nearly all languages) are the three voiceless stops , , , and the two nasals , . However, even these common five are not completely universal. Several languages in the vicinity of the
Sahara Desert, including
Arabic, lack . Several languages of North America, such as
Mohawk, lack both of the labials and . The
Wichita language of
Oklahoma and some West African languages, such as
Ijo, lack the consonant on a phonemic level, but do use it phonetically, as an
allophone of another consonant (of in the case of Ijo, and of in Wichita). A few languages on
Bougainville Island and around
Puget Sound, such as
Makah, lack both of the nasals and altogether, except in special speech registers such as baby-talk. The 'click language'
Nǁng lacks , and colloquial
Samoan lacks both alveolars, and . Despite the 80-odd consonants of
Ubykh, it lacks the plain velar in native words, as do the related
Adyghe and
Kabardian languages. But with a few striking exceptions, such as
Xavante and
Tahitian—which have no dorsal consonants whatsoever—nearly all other languages have at least one velar consonant: most of the few languages that do not have a simple (that is, a sound that is generally pronounced ) have a consonant that is very similar. For instance, an areal feature of the
Pacific Northwest coast is that historical *k has become palatalized in many languages, so that
Saanich for example has and but no plain ; similarly, historical *k in the
Northwest Caucasian languages became palatalized to in extinct
Ubykh and to in most
Circassian dialects.
[Viacheslav A. Chirikba, 1996, ''Common West Caucasian: the reconstruction of its phonological system and parts of its lexicon and morphology'', p. 192. Research School CNWS: Leiden.]
Audio samples
The following pages include consonant charts with links to audio samples.
*
IPA pulmonic consonant chart with audio
*
Ejective consonant
*
Click consonant
*
Implosive consonant
See also
*
Articulatory phonetics
*
List of consonants This is a list of all the consonants which have a dedicated letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet, plus some of the consonants which require diacritics, ordered by place and manner of articulation.
Ordered by place of articulation
Labi ...
*
List of phonetics topics
*
Words without vowels
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
Notes
References
;Sources
*Ian Maddieson, ''Patterns of Sounds'', Cambridge University Press, 1984.
External links
*
Interactive manner and place of articulationConsonants (Journal of West African Languages)
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