In phonology, an allophone is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive and the aspirated form are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, and are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English.
Breathy voiceBRETH-ee is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like sound. A simple breathy phonation,, can sometimes be heard as an allophone of English between vowels, such as in the word behind, for some speakers.
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 the case of German ; or the side of the tongue against the molars, in the case of Welsh. This turbulent airflow is called frication.
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.
An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation. It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pair. English has two affricate phonemes, and, often spelled ch and j, respectively.
Pharyngealization is a secondary articulation of consonants or vowels by which the pharynx or epiglottis is constricted during the articulation of the sound.
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some languages have glottalized sonorants with creaky voice that pattern with ejectives phonologically, and other languages have ejectives that pattern with implosives, which has led to phonologists positing a phonological class of glottalic consonants, which includes ejectives.
The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective or otherwise non-pulmonic stops, *pʼ *tʼ *kʼ, instead of the plain voiced ones, *b *d *ɡ as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions.
In phonetics, voice onset time (VOT) is a feature of the production of stop consonants. It is defined as the length of time that passes between the release of a stop consonant and the onset of voicing, the vibration of the vocal folds, or, according to other authors, periodicity. Some authors allow negative values to mark voicing that begins during the period of articulatory closure for the consonant and continues in the release, for those unaspirated voiced stops in which there is no voicing present at the instant of articulatory closure.
In linguistics, a tenuis consonant is an obstruent that is voiceless, unaspirated and unglottalized.
Sikkimese is a language of the Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Bhutia people in Sikkim in northeast India, parts of Koshi province in eastern Nepal, and Bhutan. It is one of the official languages of Sikkim.
Unicode supports several phonetic scripts and notation systems through its existing scripts and the addition of extra blocks with phonetic characters. These phonetic characters are derived from an existing script, usually Latin, Greek or Cyrillic. Apart from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), extensions to the IPA and obsolete and nonstandard IPA symbols, these blocks also contain characters from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet.
Unlike many languages, Icelandic has only very minor dialectal differences in sounds. The language has both monophthongs and diphthongs, and many consonants can be voiced or unvoiced.
This article is about the sound system of the Navajo language. The phonology of Navajo is intimately connected to its morphology. For example, the entire range of contrastive consonants is found only at the beginning of word stems. In stem-final position and in prefixes, the number of contrasts is drastically reduced. Similarly, vowel contrasts found outside of the stem are significantly neutralized. For details about the morphology of Navajo, see Navajo grammar.
There is no standard variety of Scottish Gaelic; although statements below are about all or most dialects, the north-western dialects are discussed more than others as they represent the majority of speakers.
The phonology of Burmese is fairly typical of a Southeast Asian language, involving phonemic tone or register, a contrast between major and minor syllables, and strict limitations on consonant clusters.
The phonology of Faroese has an inventory similar to the closely related Icelandic language, but markedly different processes differentiate the two. Similarities include an aspiration contrast in stop consonants, the retention of front rounded vowels and vowel quality changes instead of vowel length distinctions.
Pulmonic-contour clicks, also called sequential linguo-pulmonic consonants, are consonants that transition from a click to an ordinary pulmonic sound, or more precisely, have an audible delay between the front and rear release of the click. All click types have linguo-pulmonic variants, which occur as both stops and affricates, and are attested in four phonations: tenuis, voiced, aspirated, and murmured. At least a voiceless linguo-pulmonic affricate is attested from all Khoisan languages of southern Africa, as well as (reportedly) from the Bantu language Yeyi from the same area, but they are unattested elsewhere.
This article aims to describe the phonology and phonetics of central Luxembourgish, which is regarded as the emerging standard.
