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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 refer to two separate concepts: *Voicing can refer to the ''articulatory process'' in which the vocal folds vibrate, its primary use in phonetics to describe phones, which are particular speech sounds. *It can also refer to a classification of speech sounds that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory level. That is the term's primary use in phonology: to describe phonemes; while in phonetics its primary use is to describe phones. For example, voicing accounts for the difference between the pair of sounds associated with the English letters "s" and "z". The two sounds are transcribed as and to distinguish them from the English letters, which have several possible pronunciations, depending on the context. If one places the fingers on the voice box (i.e. the location of the
Adam's apple The Adam's apple or laryngeal prominence is the protrusion in the human neck formed by the angle of the thyroid cartilage surrounding the larynx, typically visible in men, less frequently in women. Structure The topographic structure which is e ...
in the upper throat), one can feel a vibration while is pronounced but not with (For a more detailed, technical explanation, see modal voice and
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 defini ...
.) In most European languages, with a notable exception being Icelandic, vowels and other
sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are ...
s (consonants such as ''m, n, l,'' and ''r)'' are
modally voiced Modal voice is the vocal register used most frequently in speech and singing in most languages. It is also the term used in linguistics for the most common phonation of vowels. The term "modal" refers to the resonant mode of vocal folds; that is ...
. Yidiny has no underlyingly voiceless consonants, only voiced ones. When used to classify speech sounds, voiced and unvoiced are merely labels used to group
phones A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
and phonemes together for the purposes of classification.


Notation

The
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
has distinct letters for many voiceless and voiced pairs of consonants (the
obstruent An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...
s), such as . In addition, there is a diacritic for voicedness: ⟨⟩. Diacritics are typically used with letters for prototypically voiceless sounds. In Unicode, the symbols are encoded and . The extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet have a notation for partial voicing and devoicing as well as for prevoicing: Partial voicing can mean light but continuous voicing, discontinuous voicing, or discontinuities in the degree of voicing. For the example, could be an with (some) voicing in the middle and could be with (some) devoicing in the middle. Partial voicing can also be indicated in the normal IPA with transcriptions like and .


In English

The distinction between the articulatory use of voice and the phonological use rests on the distinction between
phone A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
(represented between square brackets) and phoneme (represented between slashes). The difference is best illustrated by a rough example. The English word ''nods'' is made up of a sequence of phonemes, represented symbolically as , or the sequence of , , , and . Each symbol is an abstract representation of a phoneme. That awareness is an inherent part of speakers' mental grammar that allows them to recognise words. However, phonemes are not sounds in themselves. Rather, phonemes are, in a sense, converted to phones before being spoken. The phoneme, for instance, can actually be pronounced as either the phone or the phone since is frequently devoiced, even in fluent speech, especially at the end of an utterance. The sequence of phones for ''nods'' might be transcribed as or , depending on the presence or strength of this devoicing. While the phone has articulatory voicing, the phone does not have it. What complicates the matter is that for English, consonant phonemes are classified as either voiced or voiceless even though it is not the primary distinctive feature between them. Still, the classification is used as a stand-in for phonological processes, such as vowel lengthening that occurs before voiced consonants but not before unvoiced consonants or vowel quality changes (the sound of the vowel) in some dialects of English that occur before unvoiced but not voiced consonants. Such processes allow English speakers to continue to perceive difference between voiced and voiceless consonants when the devoicing of the former would otherwise make them sound identical to the latter. English has four pairs of fricative phonemes that can be divided into a table by place of articulation and voicing. The voiced fricatives can readily be felt to have voicing throughout the duration of the phone especially when they occur between vowels. However, in the class of consonants called
stop Stop may refer to: Places * Stop, Kentucky, an unincorporated community in the United States * Stop (Rogatica), a village in Rogatica, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina Facilities * Bus stop * Truck stop, a type of rest stop for truck d ...
s, such as , the contrast is more complicated for English. The "voiced" sounds do not typically feature articulatory voicing throughout the sound. The difference between the unvoiced stop phonemes and the voiced stop phonemes is not just a matter of whether articulatory voicing is present or not. Rather, it includes when voicing starts (if at all), the presence of aspiration (airflow burst following the release of the closure) and the duration of the closure and aspiration. English voiceless stops are generally aspirated at the beginning of a stressed syllable, and in the same context, their voiced counterparts are voiced only partway through. In more narrow phonetic transcription, the voiced symbols are maybe used only to represent the presence of articulatory voicing, and aspiration is represented with a superscript ''h''. When the consonants come at the end of a syllable, however, what distinguishes them is quite different. Voiceless phonemes are typically unaspirated, glottalized and the closure itself may not even be released, making it sometimes difficult to hear the difference between, for example, ''light'' and ''like''. However, auditory cues remain to distinguish between voiced and voiceless sounds, such as what has been described above, like the length of the preceding vowel. Other English sounds, the vowels and sonorants, are normally fully voiced. However, they may be devoiced in certain positions, especially after aspirated consonants, as in ''coffee'', ''tree'', and ''play'' in which the voicing is delayed to the extent of missing the sonorant or vowel altogether.


Degrees of voicing

There are two variables to degrees of voicing: intensity (discussed under
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 defini ...
), and duration (discussed under voice onset time). When a sound is described as "half voiced" or "partially voiced", it is not always clear whether that means that the voicing is weak (low intensity) or if the voicing occurs during only part of the sound (short duration). In the case of English, it is the latter. Juǀʼhoansi and some of its neighboring languages are typologically unusual in having contrastive partially-voiced consonants. They have aspirate and ejective consonants, which are normally incompatible with voicing, in voiceless and voiced pairs. The consonants start out voiced but become voiceless partway through and allow normal aspiration or ejection. They are and and a similar series of clicks.


Voice and tenseness

There are languages with two sets of contrasting
obstruent An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...
s that are labelled vs. even though there is no involvement of voice (or voice onset time) in that contrast. That happens, for instance, in several
Alemannic German Alemannic, or rarely Alemannish (''Alemannisch'', ), is a group of High German dialects. The name derives from the ancient Germanic tribal confederation known as the Alamanni ("all men"). Distribution Alemannic dialects are spoken by approxim ...
dialects. Because voice is not involved, this is explained as a contrast in tenseness, called a
fortis and lenis In linguistics, fortis and lenis ( and ; Latin for "strong" and "weak"), sometimes identified with tense and lax, are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy, respectively. English has fortis consonants, such as the ...
contrast. There is a hypothesis that the contrast between fortis and lenis consonants is related to the contrast between voiceless and voiced consonants. That relation is based on sound perception as well as on sound production, where consonant voice, tenseness and
length Length is a measure of distance. In the International System of Quantities, length is a quantity with dimension distance. In most systems of measurement a base unit for length is chosen, from which all other units are derived. In the Interna ...
are only different manifestations of a common sound feature.


See also

* Consonant voicing and devoicing *
Dyscravia Dyscravia is a voicing substitution dysgraphia, i.e. a type of writing disorder in which the affected person confuses letters denoting sounds that differ in their voicing attribute (e.g. writing "dap" instead of "tap" or "tash" instead of "dash"). ...
* List of language disorders *
Manner of articulation In articulatory phonetics, the manner of articulation is the configuration and interaction of the articulators (speech organs such as the tongue, lips, and palate) when making a speech sound. One parameter of manner is ''stricture,'' that is, h ...
*
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 defini ...
* Place of articulation * Voice onset time * Voicelessness


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Voice (Phonetics) Phonetics