External links
- Simple interface to UPSID, including the list of languages and searches by selected criteria
- Info on obtaining UPSID information from UCLA
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The UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (or UPSID) is a statistical survey of the phoneme inventories in 451 of the world's languages. The database was created by American phonetician Ian Maddieson for the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1984 and has been updated several times.
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Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the upper teeth. Alveolar consonants may be articulated with the tip of the tongue, as in English, or with the flat of the tongue just above the tip, as in French and Spanish.
The voiced alveolar approximant is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the alveolar and postalveolar approximants is ⟨ɹ⟩, a lowercase letter r rotated 180 degrees. The equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is r\.
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, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is K. The symbol is called "belted l" and is distinct from "l with tilde",, which transcribes a different sound, the velarized alveolar lateral approximant, often called "dark L".
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 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 English and Icelandic letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced (inter)dental non-sibilant fricative. Such fricatives are often called "interdental" because they are often produced with the tongue between the upper and lower teeth, and not just against the back of the upper teeth, as they are with other dental consonants.
The epiglottal or pharyngeal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʡ⟩.
The close central unrounded vowel, or high central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɨ⟩, namely the lower-case letter i with a horizontal bar. Both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as barred i.
The open-mid central unrounded vowel, or low-mid central unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɜ⟩. The IPA symbol is not the digit ⟨3⟩ or the Cyrillic small letter Ze (з). The symbol is instead a reversed Latinized variant of the lowercase epsilon, ɛ. The value was specified only in 1993; until then, it had been transcribed ⟨ɛ̈⟩.
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 sonorants, as are nasals like and, liquids like and, and semivowels like and. This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents.
Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can be modified by phonation. Contrastive implosives are found in approximately 13% of the world's languages.
In phonetics, a glottalic consonant is a consonant produced with some important contribution of the glottis.
Ian Maddieson is British-American linguist and professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, in the United States. He has served as Vice-President of the International Phonetic Association, and Secretary of the Association for Laboratory Phonology. Maddieson is best known for his work in phonetics, and phonological typology. He spent most of his academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he often collaborated with Peter Ladefoged in describing the patterns of speech sounds in the world's spoken languages.
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 consonants.
Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was a British linguist and phonetician.
Paicî is the most widely spoken of the two dozen languages on the main island of New Caledonia. It is spoken in a band across the center of the island, from Poindimié to Ponérihouen.
The voiced epiglottal or pharyngeal tap or flap is not known to exist as a phoneme in any language. However, it exists as the intervocalic voiced allophone of the otherwise voiceless epiglottal stop of Dahalo and perhaps of other languages. It may also exist in Iraqi Arabic, where the consonant 'ayn is too short to be an epiglottal stop, but has too much of a burst to be a fricative or approximant.
Iaai is a language of Ouvéa Island. It shares the island of Ouvéa with Fagauvea, a Polynesian outlier language.
A labio-palatalized sound is one that is simultaneously labialized and palatalized. Typically the roundedness is compressed, like, rather than protruded like. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet for this secondary articulation is ⟨ᶣ⟩, a superscript ⟨ɥ⟩, the symbol for the labialized palatal approximant. If such sounds pattern with other, labialized, consonants, they may instead be transcribed as palatalized consonants plus labialization, ⟨ʷ⟩, as with the = of Abkhaz or the = of Akan.
Margi, also known as Marghi and Marghi Central, is a Chadic language spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon, and Chad. It is perhaps the best described of the Biu–Mandara branch of that family. Marghi South language and Putai are closely related and sometimes considered dialects of Margi.
PHOIBLE is a linguistic database accessible through its website and compiling phonological inventories from primary documents and tertiary databases into a single, easily searchable sample. The 2019 version 2.0 includes 3,020 inventories containing 3,183 segment types found in 2,186 distinct languages. It is edited by Steven Moran, Assistant Professor from the Institute of Biology at the University of Neuchâtel and Daniel McCloy, Researcher at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington.