phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

and

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

, a postvocalic consonant is a

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

that occurs after a vowel. Examples include the ''n'' in ''stand'' or the ''n'' in ''sun''. Contrarily, if a consonant occurs between two vowels, it is called '' intervocalic''. A specially behaving postvocalic consonant in the English language is the postvocalic "r," often known as the English

rhotic consonant In phonetics, rhotic consonants, or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthography, orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek alphabet, Greek letter Rho (letter), rho (Ρ and ρ), including R, , i ...

, whose behavior alone divides the language into rhotic vs. non-rhotic accents.

References

Phonetics Phonology {{phonetics-stub