A fricative is a
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
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
The soft palate (also known as the velum, palatal velum, or muscular palate) is, in mammals, the soft tissue constituting the back of the roof of the mouth. The soft palate is part of the palate of the mouth; the other part is the hard palat ...
in the case of
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
(the final consonant of ''
Bach''); or the side of the tongue against the
molars, in the case of
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
(appearing twice in the name ''
Llanelli
Llanelli ("St Elli's Parish"; ) is a market town and the largest community in Carmarthenshire and the preserved county of Dyfed, Wales. It is located on the Loughor estuary north-west of Swansea and south-east of the county town, Carma ...
''). This turbulent airflow is called frication.
A particular subset of fricatives are the
sibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of the teeth.
English , , , and are examples of sibilants.
The usage of two other terms is less standardized: "Spirant" is an older term for fricatives used by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists. "Strident" could mean just "sibilant", but some authors include also
labiodental and
uvular fricatives in the class.
Types
The airflow is not completely stopped in the production of fricative consonants. In other words, the airflow experiences
friction
Friction is the force resisting the relative motion of solid surfaces, fluid layers, and material elements sliding against each other. There are several types of friction:
*Dry friction is a force that opposes the relative lateral motion of ...
.
Sibilants
*
voiceless coronal sibilant, as in English ''s''ip
*
voiced coronal sibilant, as in English ''z''ip
**
voiceless dental sibilant
**
voiced dental sibilant
**
voiceless apical sibilant
**
voiced apical sibilant
** voiceless predorsal sibilant (
laminal
A laminal consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue in contact
with upper lip, teeth, alveolar ridge, to possibly, as ...
, with tongue tip at lower teeth)
** voiced predorsal sibilant (laminal)
**
voiceless postalveolar sibilant (laminal)
**
voiced postalveolar sibilant (laminal)
*
voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant (
domed, partially palatalized), as in English ''sh''ip
*
voiced palato-alveolar sibilant
A voiced postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The International Phonetic Association uses term ''voiced postalveolar fricative'' only for the sound , but it also describes the voiced postalveol ...
(domed, partially palatalized), as the ''si'' in English vi''si''on
*
voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant (laminal, palatalized)
*
voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant (laminal, palatalized)
*
voiceless retroflex sibilant
The voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is which is a Latin letter s combined with a retroflex h ...
(
apical or
subapical)
*
voiced retroflex sibilant (apical or subapical)
All
sibilants are
coronal, but may be
dental,
alveolar,
postalveolar, or
palatal (
retroflex) within that range. However, at the postalveolar place of articulation, the tongue may take several shapes: domed,
laminal
A laminal consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the blade of the tongue, the flat top front surface just behind the tip of the tongue in contact
with upper lip, teeth, alveolar ridge, to possibly, as ...
, or
apical, and each of these is given a separate symbol and a separate name. Prototypical retroflexes are
subapical and palatal, but they are usually written with the same symbol as the apical postalveolars. The alveolars and dentals may also be either apical or laminal, but this difference is indicated with diacritics rather than with separate symbols.
Central non-sibilant fricatives
*
voiceless bilabial fricative
*
voiced bilabial fricative
*
voiceless labiodental fricative
The voiceless labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in a number of spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is .
Some scholars also posit the voiceless labiodental app ...
, as in English ''f''ine
*
voiced labiodental fricative
The voiced labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is v.
The sound is similar to ...
, as in English ''v''ine
*
voiceless linguolabial fricative
The voiceless linguolabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents it is or .
Features
Features:
Occurrence
References
{{IPA navig ...
*
voiced linguolabial fricative
The voiced linguolabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents it is or .
Features
Features:
Occurrence
References
External links ...
*
voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative, as in English ''th''ing
*
voiced dental non-sibilant fricative
The voiced dental fricative is a consonant sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English-speakers as the ''th'' sound in ''father''. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is eth, or and was taken from the Old Engl ...
, as in English ''th''at
*
voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative
*
voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative
The voiced alveolar fricatives are consonantal sounds. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents these sounds depends on whether a sibilant or non-sibilant fricative is being described.
* The symbol for the alveolar sibilan ...
*
voiceless trilled fricative
*
voiced trilled fricative
*
voiceless palatal fricative
*
voiced palatal fricative
*
voiceless velar fricative
The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English, e.g. in ''loc ...
*
voiced velar fricative
*
voiceless palatal-velar fricative (articulation disputed)
The IPA also has letters for epiglottal fricatives,
*
voiceless epiglottal fricative
The voiceless epiglottal or pharyngeal trill, or voiceless epiglottal fricative,John Esling (2010) "Phonetic Notation", in Hardcastle, Laver & Gibbon (eds) ''The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences'', 2nd ed., p 695. is a type of consonantal sound, us ...
*
voiced epiglottal fricative
with allophonic trilling, but these might be better analyzed as pharyngeal trills.
*
voiceless velopharyngeal fricative
A velopharyngeal fricative, also known as a posterior nasal fricative, is a sound produced by some children with speech disorders, including some with a cleft palate, as a substitute for sibilants (), which cannot be produced with a cleft pala ...
(often occurs with a
cleft palate)
*
voiced velopharyngeal fricative
Lateral fricatives
*
voiceless dental lateral fricative
The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is , ...
*
voiced dental lateral fricative
The voiced alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is (sometimes ...
*
voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
The voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiceless dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is , ...
*
voiced alveolar lateral fricative
*
voiceless postalveolar lateral fricative (
Mehri)
*
voiced postalveolar lateral fricative
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as ''unvoiced'') or voiced.
The term, however, is used to re ...
* or extIPA
voiceless retroflex lateral fricative
* or extIPA
Voiced retroflex lateral fricative (in
Ao)
* or or extIPA
voiceless palatal lateral fricative
* or extIPA
voiced palatal lateral fricative
The voiced palatal lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is L_r.
It is not known to ...
(allophonic in
Jebero)
* or extIPA
voiceless velar lateral fricative
* or extIPA
voiced velar lateral fricative
The lateral fricative occurs as the ''ll'' of
Welsh
Welsh may refer to:
Related to Wales
* Welsh, referring or related to Wales
* Welsh language, a Brittonic Celtic language spoken in Wales
* Welsh people
People
* Welsh (surname)
* Sometimes used as a synonym for the ancient Britons (Celtic peopl ...
, as in ''
Lloyd
Lloyd, Lloyd's, or Lloyds may refer to:
People
* Lloyd (name), a variation of the Welsh word ' or ', which means "grey" or "brown"
** List of people with given name Lloyd
** List of people with surname Lloyd
* Lloyd (singer) (born 1986), America ...
'', ''
Llewelyn'', and ''
Machynlleth'' (, a town), as the unvoiced 'hl' and voiced 'dl' or 'dhl' in the several languages of Southern Africa (such as
Xhosa and
Zulu), and in Mongolian.
* or and
voiceless grooved lateral alveolar fricative (a
laterally lisped or ) (Modern South Arabian)
* or and
voiced grooved lateral alveolar fricative
A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English ''L'', as in ''L ...
(a laterally lisped or ) (Modern South Arabian)
IPA letters used for both fricatives and approximants
*
voiceless uvular fricative
The voiceless uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , the Greek chi. The sound is represented by (ex with underdot) in Am ...
*
voiced uvular fricative
*
voiceless pharyngeal fricative
*
voiced pharyngeal fricative
The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\. Epiglott ...
No language distinguishes voiced fricatives from
approximants
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
at these places, so the same symbol is used for both. For the pharyngeal, approximants are more numerous than fricatives. A fricative realization may be specified by adding the
uptack to the letters, . Likewise, the
downtack may be added to specify an approximant realization, .
(The
bilabial approximant and
dental approximant do not have dedicated symbols either and are transcribed in a similar fashion: . However, the base letters are understood to specifically refer to the fricatives.)
Pseudo-fricatives
*
voiceless glottal transition
The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless glottal transition, and sometimes called the aspirate, is a type of sound used in some spoken languages that patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant ''phonologically'', b ...
, as in English ''hat''
*
breathy-voiced glottal transition
In many languages, such as English, the glottal "fricatives" are unaccompanied
phonation
The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defin ...
states of the glottis, without any accompanying
manner, fricative or otherwise. However, in languages such as Arabic, they are true fricatives.
In addition, is usually called a "
voiceless labial-velar fricative", but it is actually an approximant. True doubly articulated fricatives may not occur in any language; but see
voiceless palatal-velar fricative for a putative (and rather controversial) example.
Aspirated fricatives
Fricatives are very commonly voiced, though cross-linguistically voiced fricatives are not nearly as common as
tenuis ("plain") fricatives. Other
phonation
The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defin ...
s are common in languages that have those phonations in their stop consonants. However, phonemically
aspirated fricatives are rare. contrasts with a tense, unaspirated in
Korean; aspirated fricatives are also found in a few
Sino-Tibetan languages
Sino-Tibetan, also cited as Trans-Himalayan in a few sources, is a family of more than 400 languages, second only to Indo-European in number of native speakers. The vast majority of these are the 1.3 billion native speakers of Chinese languages ...
, in some
Oto-Manguean languages
The Oto-Manguean or Otomanguean languages are a large family comprising several subfamilies of indigenous languages of the Americas. All of the Oto-Manguean languages that are now spoken are indigenous to Mexico, but the Manguean branch of the ...
, in the Siouan language
Ofo
Ofo (), stylised as ofo, was a Beijing-based Bicycle-sharing system, bicycle sharing company founded in 2014. It used a Bicycle-sharing system#Dockless bikes, dockless system with a smartphone app to unlock and locate nearby bicycles, charging ...
( and ), and in the (central?)
Chumash languages ( and ). The record may be
Cone Tibetan, which has four contrastive aspirated fricatives: , , and .
Nasalized fricatives
Phonemically
nasalized fricatives are rare.
Umbundu has and Kwangali and
Souletin Basque have . In
Coatzospan Mixtec, appear allophonically before a nasal vowel, and in Igbo nasality is a feature of the syllable; when occur in nasal syllables they are themselves nasalized.
----
Occurrence
Until its extinction,
Ubykh may have been the language with the most fricatives (29 not including ), some of which did not have dedicated symbols or diacritics in the
IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners A ...
. This number actually outstrips the number of all consonants in English (which has 24 consonants). By contrast, approximately 8.7% of the world's languages have no phonemic fricatives at all. This is a typical feature of
Australian Aboriginal languages
The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...
, where the few fricatives that exist result from changes to
plosive
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 (, ), lip ...
s or
approximant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce ...
s, but also occurs in some indigenous languages of
New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torres ...
and South America that have especially small numbers of consonants. However, whereas is ''entirely'' unknown in indigenous Australian languages, most of the other languages without true fricatives do have in their consonant inventory.
Voicing contrasts in fricatives are largely confined to Europe, Africa, and Western Asia. Languages of South and East Asia, such as
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 ...
,
Korean, the
Dravidian and
Austronesian languages, typically do not have such voiced fricatives as and , which are familiar to many European speakers. These voiced fricatives are also relatively rare in indigenous languages of the Americas. Overall, voicing contrasts in fricatives are much rarer than in plosives, being found only in about a third of the world's languages as compared to 60 percent for plosive voicing contrasts.
About 15 percent of the world's languages, however, have ''unpaired voiced fricatives'', i.e. a voiced fricative without a voiceless counterpart. Two-thirds of these, or 10 percent of all languages, have unpaired voiced fricatives but no voicing contrast between any fricative pair.
This phenomenon occurs because voiced fricatives have developed from
lenition of plosives or
fortition of approximants. This phenomenon of unpaired voiced fricatives is scattered throughout the world, but is confined to nonsibilant fricatives with the exception of a couple of languages that have but lack . (Relatedly, several languages have the
voiced affricate but lack , and vice versa.) The fricatives that occur most often without a voiceless counterpart are – in order of ratio of unpaired occurrences to total occurrences – , , , and .
Acoustics
Fricatives appear in
waveforms as somewhat random noise caused by the turbulent airflow, upon which a periodic pattern is overlaid if voiced. Fricatives produced in the front of the mouth tend to have energy concentration at higher frequencies than ones produced in the back. The centre of gravity (''CoG''), i.e. the average frequency in a spectrum weighted by the amplitude (also known as ''spectral mean''), may be used to determine the place of articulation of a fricative relative to that of another.
See also
*
Apical consonant
An apical consonant is a phone (speech sound) produced by obstructing the air passage with the tip of the tongue (apex) in conjunction with upper articulators from lips to postalveolar, and possibly prepalatal. It contrasts with laminal cons ...
*
Hush consonant
*
Laminal consonant
*
List of phonetics topics
Notes
References
External links
Fricatives in English
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fricative Consonant
Manner of articulation