Consonant


In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are, pronounced with the lips;, pronounced with the front of the tongue;, pronounced with the back of the tongue;, pronounced in the throat; and, pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel ; and and, which have air flowing through the nose. Contrasting with consonants are vowels.
Since the number of possible sounds in all of 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 to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each attested consonant. In fact, the English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than English has consonant sounds, so digraphs like "ch", "sh", "th", and "zh" are used to extend the alphabet, and some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled "th" in "this" is a different consonant from the "th" sound in "thin".

Etymology

The word consonant comes from Latin oblique stem cōnsonant-, from cōnsonāns "sounding-together ", a calque of Greek σύμφωνον sýmphōnon.
Dionysius Thrax calls consonants sýmphōna "pronounced with" because they can only be pronounced with a vowel. He divides them into two subcategories: hēmíphōna, semivowels, which correspond to continuants, not semivowels, and áphōna, mute or silent consonants, which correspond to stops, not voiceless consonants.
This description does not apply to some human languages, such as the Salishan languages, in which stops sometimes occur without vowels, and the modern conception of consonant does not require co-occurrence with vowels.

Letters

The word consonant is also used to refer to a letter of an alphabet that denotes a consonant sound. The 21 consonant letters in the English alphabet are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Z, and usually W and Y. The letter Y stands for the consonant in yoke, the vowel in myth, the vowel in funny, the diphthong in my, the r-colored vowel in myrrh, the last part of many diphthongs and/or digraphs and numerous other phonemes. W always represents a consonant except in combination with a vowel letter, as in growth, raw, and how, and in a few loanwords from Welsh, where it stands for, like crwth or cwm.
In some other languages, such as Finnish, y only represents a vowel sound.

Consonants versus vowels

Consonants and vowels correspond to distinct parts of a syllable: The most sonorous part of the syllable, called the syllabic peak or nucleus, is typically a vowel, while the less sonorous margins 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 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, including Mandarin Chinese. 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. 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:
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 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 as phonemes, such as,, and. 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 common consonants around the world are the three voiceless stops,,, and the two nasals,. However, even these common five are not 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 as an allophone of another consonant. A few languages on Bougainville Island and around Puget Sound, such as Makah, lack both of the nasals and. 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: the few languages that do not have a simple usually have a consonant that is very similar. For instance, an areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical * has become palatalized in many languages, so that Saanich for example has and but no plain ; similarly, historical * in the Northwest Caucasian languages became palatalized to in Ubykh and in most Circassian dialects.
The most frequent consonant in many languages is.

Audio samples

The following pages include consonant charts with links to audio samples.