Contents

1 Aricate consonant 1
1.1 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.3 Aricates vs. stopfricative sequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.4 List of aricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.4.1 Sibilant aricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.4.2 Non-sibilant aricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.4.3 Lateral aricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.4.4 Trilled aricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.4.5 Heterorganic aricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.4.6 Phonation, coarticulation and other variants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.5 Phonological representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.6 Arication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.7 Pre-arication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.8 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.9 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.10 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Approximant consonant 4
2.1 Semivowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2 Approximants versus fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.3 Central approximants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.4 Lateral approximants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.5 Coarticulated approximants with dedicated IPA symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.6 Voiceless approximants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.7 Nasal approximants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.8 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.9 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.10 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3 Aspirated consonant 8
3.1 Transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.2 Phonetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

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3.2.1 Degree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
3.2.2 Doubling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.2.3 Preaspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.2.4 Fricative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.2.5 Voiced consonants with voiceless aspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.3 Phonology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.3.1 Allophonic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.3.2 Phonemic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.3.3 Absence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.4 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.4.1 Chinese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.4.2 Indian languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.4.3 Armenian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.4.4 Greek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.5 Other uses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.5.1 Debuccalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.5.2 Breathy-voiced release . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.6 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.7 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.8 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

4 Flap consonant 12
4.1 Contrast with stops and trills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.2 Tap vs. ap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.3 IPA symbols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.4 Types of aps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.4.1 Alveolar aps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
4.4.2 Retroex aps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.4.3 Lateral aps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.4.4 Non-coronal aps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
4.4.5 Nasal aps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.4.6 Tapped fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

5 Fricative consonant 15
5.1 Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.1.1 Sibilants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.1.2 Central non-sibilant fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
5.1.3 Lateral fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.1.4 IPA letters used for both fricatives and approximants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
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5.1.5 Pseudo-fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.1.6 Aspirated fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.1.7 Nasalized fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
5.2 Occurrence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.3 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.4 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
5.5 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

6 Fundamental frequency 18
6.1 Explanation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
6.2 In music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.3 Mechanical systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
6.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
6.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

7 Harmonic 21
7.1 Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
7.2 Partials, overtones, and harmonics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
7.3 Harmonics on stringed instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
7.3.1 Table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.3.2 Articial harmonics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.4 Other information . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
7.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

8 Lateral consonant 24
8.1 Examples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
8.2 List of laterals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8.2.1 Approximants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8.2.2 Fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8.2.3 Aricates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8.2.4 Flaps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8.2.5 Ejective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8.2.6 Clicks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
8.3 Ambiguous centrality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
8.4 Lateralized consonants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
8.5 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
8.6 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
8.7 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

9 Nasal consonant 27
9.1 Denition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
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9.2 Voiceless nasals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

9.3 Other kinds of nasal consonant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
9.4 Languages without nasals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
9.5 Lack of phonemic nasals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
9.6 Lack of phonetic nasals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
9.7 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
9.8 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
9.9 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
9.10 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

10 Nasalization 30
10.1 Nasal vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.2 Nasal consonants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.3 Nasalized consonants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.4 True nasal (nareal) fricatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
10.5 Denasalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.6 Contextual nasalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.7 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
10.8 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

11 Overtone singing 32
11.1 Asia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
11.1.1 Mongolia and Buryatia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
11.1.2 Tuva . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
11.1.3 Altai and Khakassia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
11.1.4 Chukchi Peninsula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
11.1.5 Tibet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
11.1.6 Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.1.7 Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.1.8 Hokkaido . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.2 Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.2.1 Sardinia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.2.2 Northern Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.2.3 Bashkortostan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.3 North America . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.3.1 Inuit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.4 Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.4.1 South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
11.5 Non-traditional styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
11.5.1 Canada, United States and Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
11.5.2 India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
11.6 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
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11.7 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
11.8 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
11.9 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

12 Sibilant 36
12.1 Acoustics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
12.2 Sibilant types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
12.2.1 Tongue shape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
12.2.2 Place of articulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
12.2.3 Point of contact on the tongue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
12.3 Symbols in the IPA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
12.4 Possible combinations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
12.4.1 Whistled sibilants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
12.5 Linguistic contrasts among sibilants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
12.6 Contested denitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
12.7 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
12.8 Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
12.9 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

13 Stop consonant 40
13.1 Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
13.2 Common stops . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
13.3 Articulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
13.4 Classication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
13.4.1 Voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
13.4.2 Aspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
13.4.3 Length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
13.4.4 Nasalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
13.4.5 Airstream mechanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.4.6 Tenseness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.5 Transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.5.1 English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.5.2 Variations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.6 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.7 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
13.8 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

14 Tenseness 43
14.1 Vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
14.2 Consonants . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
14.3 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
14.4 Sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
vi CONTENTS

14.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

15 Trill consonant 45
15.1 Phonemic trills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
15.2 Extralinguistic trills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
15.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
15.4 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
15.5 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
15.6 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

16 Vocal folds 47
16.1 Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
16.1.1 Variations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
16.1.2 False vocal folds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
16.1.3 Histology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
16.1.4 Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
16.2 Function . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
16.2.1 Oscillation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
16.3 Clinical signicance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
16.3.1 Wound healing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
16.4 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
16.4.1 Etymology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
16.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
16.6 Additional images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
16.7 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
16.8 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
16.9 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

17 Voice (phonetics) 56
17.1 Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
17.2 In English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
17.3 Degrees of voicing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
17.4 Voice and tenseness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
17.5 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
17.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

18 Voice-onset time 59
18.1 History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
18.2 Analytic problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
18.3 Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
18.4 Transcription . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
18.5 Examples in languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
18.6 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
CONTENTS vii

18.7 External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

19 Vowel 62
19.1 Denition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
19.2 Articulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
19.2.1 Height . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
19.2.2 Backness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
19.2.3 Front, raised and retracted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
19.2.4 Roundedness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
19.2.5 Nasalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
19.2.6 Phonation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
19.2.7 Tongue root retraction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
19.2.8 Secondary narrowings in the vocal tract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
19.2.9 Tenseness/checked vowels versus free vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
19.3 Acoustics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
19.4 Prosody and intonation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
19.5 Monophthongs, diphthongs, triphthongs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
19.6 Written vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
19.6.1 Shifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
19.7 Audio samples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
19.8 Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
19.8.1 Words without vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
19.8.2 Words consisting of only vowels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
19.9 See also . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
19.10References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
19.11Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
19.12External links . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
19.13Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
19.13.1 Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
19.13.2 Images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
19.13.3 Content license . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Chapter 1

Aricate consonant

An aricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and dz, t, d, t,

pf, ts, d, t, d, t, d , kx
releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of
articulation (most often coronal). It is often dicult to or
decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or
a consonant pair.[1] English has two aricate phonemes,
pf,
t s, dz, t , d, t , d, t , d, t , d , kx.
and [d], often spelled ch and j.
[t]

A less common notation indicates the release of the af-

fricate with a superscript:
1.1 Examples
.p, t, d, t, d, k
The English sounds spelled ch and j (transcribed [t]

and [d] in the IPA), German and Italian z [ts] and Italian This is derived from the IPA convention of indicating
z [dz] are typical aricates, and sounds like these are fairly other releases with a superscript. However, this conven-
common in the worlds languages, as are other aricates tion is more typically used for a fricated release that is too
with similar sounds, such as those in Polish and Chinese. brief to be considered a true aricate.
However, voiced aricates other than [d] are relatively
Though they are no longer standard IPA, ligatures are
uncommon. For several places of articulation they are
available in Unicode for the six common aricates
not attested at all.
Much less common are labiodental aricates, such as [pf] , , , , , .
in German and Izi, or velar aricates, such as [kx ] in
Tswana (written kg) or in High Alemannic Swiss Ger-
Any of these notations can be used to distinguish an af-
man dialects. Worldwide, relatively few languages have
fricate from a sequence of a stop plus a fricative, which in
aricates in these positions even though the correspond-
exists in some languages such as Polish. However, in lan-
ing stop consonants, [p] and [k], are common or virtu-
guages where there is no such distinction, such as English,
ally universal. Also less common are alveolar aricates
the tie bars are commonly dropped.
sound
where the fricative release is lateral, such as the [t]
found in Nahuatl and Navajo. Some other Athabaskan In other phonetic transcription systems, such as the
languages, such as Dene Suline, have unaspirated, aspi- Americanist system, aricates may be transcribed with
rated, and ejective series of aricates whose release may single letters. The aricates [ts], [dz], [t],
[d], [t],

be dental, alveolar, postalveolar, or lateral: [t], [t],
[d] are transcribed respectively as c or ; j, , or
[ts],
[t], [ts],
[ts],
[t],
[t],
[t],
[t],
[t],
and [t].
(older) ; c or ; , , or (older) ; ; and
or dl. Within the IPA, [t] and [d] are sometimes tran-
scribed with the symbols for the palatal stops, c and .

1.2 Notation
1.3 Aricates vs. stopfricative se-
Aricates are transcribed in the International Phonetic
Alphabet by a combination of two letters, one for the stop
quences
element and the other for the fricative element. In order
to show that these are parts of a single consonant, a tie In some languages (but not all), aricates contrast phone-
bar is generally used. The tie bar appears most commonly mically with stopfricative sequences:
above the two letters, but may be placed under them if it
ts better there, or simply because this is more legible.[2] Polish aricate /t/ in czysta 'clean (f.)' versus stop
Thus: fricative /t/ in trzysta 'three hundred'.

1
2 CHAPTER 1. AFFRICATE CONSONANT

Klallam aricate /ts/ in k nc 'look at me' versus 1.4.2 Non-sibilant aricates

stopfricative /ts/ in k nts 'he looks at it'.
1.4.3 Lateral aricates
The exact phonetic dierence varies between languages.
In stopfricative sequences, the stop has a release burst 1.4.4 Trilled aricates
before the fricative starts; but in aricates, the fricative
element is the release. Phonologically, stopfricative se- Main article: Trilled aricate
quences may have a syllable boundary between the two
segments, but not necessarily.
In English, /ts/ and /dz/ (nuts, nods) are considered phone-
1.4.5 Heterorganic aricates
mically stopfricative sequences because they usually
contain a morpheme boundary (for example, nuts = nut
Although most aricates are homorganic, Navajo and
+ s), but the sounds are phonetically aricates. The En-
and /d/ are generally not Chiricahua Apache have a heterorganic alveolar-velar af-
glish aricate phonemes /t/
fricate [tx] (McDonough & Ladefoged 1993, Hoijer &
at a morpheme boundary. However, depending on di-
Opler 1938). Wari has a voiceless dental bilabially trilled
alect, English speakers may distinguish an aricate from
aricate [t] (see #Trilled aricates). Other heteror-
a stopfricative sequence in some contexts such as when
ganic aricates are reported for Northern Sotho (John-
the sequence occurs across syllable boundaries:
son 2003) and other Bantu languages such as Phuthi,
which has alveolarlabiodental aricates [tf] and [dv],
cat shit /kt.t/ [kt] and Sesotho, which has bilabialpalatoalveolar acates
[p] and [b]. Djeoromitxi (Pies 1992) has [ps] and [bz].
catch it /kt.t/
]
[ktt

1.4.6 Phonation, coarticulation and other

/t/ there debuccalizes to a glottal stop before // in many

dialects, making it phonetically distinct from /t/. variants
One acoustic criterion for dierentiating aricates and The more common of the voiceless aricates are all at-
stopfricative sequences is the rate of amplitude increase tested as ejectives as well: [t, ts, t, t, t, t, c,
of the frication noise, which is known as the rise time. kx, k]. Several Khoisan languages such as !X are re-
Aricates have a short rise time to the peak frication am- ported to have voiced ejective aricates, but these may
plitude; stopfricative sequences have longer rise times actually be consonant clusters: [dts, dt]. Aricates
(Howell & Rosen 1983, Johnson 2003, Mitani et al. are also commonly aspirated: [pf, t, ts, t, t,
2006). t, t], occasionally murmured: [b v, d ], and some-
times prenasalized: [dz, dz, , ]. Labialized,
palatalized, velarized, and pharyngealized aricates also
1.4 List of aricates occur. Aricates may also have phonemic length, that is,
aected by a chroneme, as in Italian and Karelian.
In the case of coronals, the symbols t, d are normally
used for the stop portion of the aricate regardless of
is commonly seen for [].
place. For example, [t] 1.5 Phonological representation
The exemplar languages are ones that have been reported
to have these sounds, but in several cases they may need In phonology, aricates tend to behave similarly to stops,
conrmation. taking part in phonological patterns that fricatives do
not. Kehrein analyzes phonetic aricates as phonologi-
cal stops.[4] A sibilant or lateral (and presumably trilled)
stop can be realized phonetically only as an aricate and
1.4.1 Sibilant aricates so might be analyzed phonemically as a sibilant or lateral
stop. In that analysis, aricates other than sibilants and
The Northwest Caucasian languages Abkhaz and Ubykh laterals are a phonetic mechanism for distinguishing stops
both contrast sibilant aricates at four places of articula- at similar places of articulation (like more than one labial,
tion: alveolar, postalveolar, alveolo-palatal and retroex. coronal, or dorsal place). For example, Chipewyan has
They also distinguish voiceless, voiced, and ejective af- laminal dental [t] vs. apical alveolar [t]; other languages
fricates at each of these. may contrast velar [k] with palatal [c] and uvular [q].
When a language only has one type of aricate, it is usu- Aricates may also be a strategy to increase the phonetic
ally a sibilant; this is the case in e.g. some Arabic dialects contrast between aspirated or ejective and tenuis conso-
([d ]), most dialects of Spanish ([t]), and Thai ([t]). nants.
1.10. EXTERNAL LINKS
According to Kehrein, no language contrasts a non-
sibilant, non-lateral aricate with a stop at the same place
of articulation and with the same phonation and airstream
mechanism, such as /t/ and /t/ or /k/ and /kx/.
1.6 Arication
Arication (sometimes called aricatization) is a sound
change by which a consonant, usually a stop or fricative,
changes into an aricate. Examples include:
Proto-Germanic /k/ > Modern English /t/, as in
chin (cf. German Kinn: Anglo-Frisian palataliza-
tion)
Early Modern English /tj, dj/ > /t d/ (yod-
coalescence)
/p, t, k/ > /pf, ts, kx/ in the High German consonant
shift
[t] > [ts, t] before [, i] respectively in 16th-
century Japanese[5]
[r] > [d, d] word-initially in Udmurt[6]
1.7 Pre-arication
In rare instances, a fricativestop contour may occur.
This is the case in dialects of Scottish Gaelic that have ve-
lar frication [] where other dialects have pre-aspiration.
For example, in the Harris dialect there is [ak] 'seven'
and [hk] 'eight' (or [axk], [hxk]).[7] Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120
1.8 See also
Apical consonant
Hush consonant
Laminal consonant
Index of phonetics articles
1.9 References
[1] Peter Roach, Engelish Phonetics and Phonology Glassary
Archived April 12, 2015, at the Wayback Machine., 2009
[2] For example, in Niesler, Louw, & Roux (2005) Phonetic
analysis of Afrikaans, English, Xhosa and Zulu using South
African speech databases
[3]
[4] Kehrein (2002) Phonological Representation and Phonetic
Phasing
3
[5] Takayama, Tomoaki (2015). 15 Historical Phonology.
In Kubozono, Haruo. Handbook of Japanese Phonetics
and Phonology. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
pp. 629630. ISBN 9781614511984. Retrieved 12 June
2015.
[6] Cscs, Sndor (2005). Die Rekonstruktion der permischen
Grundsprache. Bibliotheca Uralica (in German). 13. Bu-
dapest: Akadmiai Kiad. p. 139. ISBN 963-05-8184-1.
[7] Laver (1994) Principles of Phonetics, p. 374.
Hoijer, Harry; & Opler, Morris E. (1938). Chiric-
ahua and Mescalero Apache texts. The University
of Chicago publications in anthropology; Linguistic
series. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Howell Peter; & Rosen, Stuart. (1983). Produc-
tion and perception of rise time in the voiceless
aricate/fricative distinction. The Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America, 73 (3), 976984.
Johnson, Keith. (2003). Acoustic & auditory pho-
netics (2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publish-
ing.
Maddieson, Ian. (1984). Patterns of sounds. Cam-
bridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-26536-3
McDonough, Joyce; & Ladefoged, Peter. (1993).
Navajo stops. UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics,
84, 151164.
Mitani, Shigeki; Kitama, Toshihiro; & Sato, Yu.
(2006). Voiceless aricate/fricative distinction by
frication duration and amplitude rise slope. The
(3), 16001607.
1.10 External links
Aricates in English
Chapter 2

Approximant consonant

Approximants are speech sounds that involve the Spanish (with a near minimal pair being abyecto [a-
articulators approaching each other but not narrowly jekto] 'abject' and abierto [aierto] 'opened').[8]
enough[1] nor with enough articulatory precision[2] to cre-
ate turbulent airow. Therefore, approximants fall be- ^* Because of the articulatory complexities
tween fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, of the American English rhotic, there is some
[3]
and vowels, which produce no turbulence. This class variation in its phonetic description. A tran-
of sounds includes lateral approximants like [l] (as scription with the IPA character for an alveolar
in less), non-lateral approximants like [] (as in rest), approximant ([]) is common, though the
and semivowels like [j] and [w] (as in yes and west, sound is more postalveolar. Actual retroex-
respectively).[3] ion may occur as well and both occur as varia-
tions of the same sound.[11] However, Catford
Before Peter Ladefoged coined the term approximant
(1988:161f) makes a distinction between the
in the 1960s,[4] the term frictionless continuant referred
vowels of American English (which he calls
to non-lateral approximants.
rhotacized) and vowels with retroexion
such as those that appear in Badaga; Trask
(1996:310), on the other hand, labels both as
2.1 Semivowels r-colored and notes that both have a lowered
third formant.[12]
Main article: Semivowel ^** Because the vowels [i ] are articulated
with spread lips, spreading is implied for their
approximant analogues, [j ]. However, these
Some approximants resemble vowels in acoustic and ar- sounds generally have little or no lip-spreading.
ticulatory properties and the terms semivowel and glide The fricative letters with a lowering diacritic,
are often used for these non-syllabic vowel-like seg- , may therefore be justied for a neutral
ments. The correlation between semivowels and vow- articulation between spread [j ] and rounded
els is strong enough that cross-language dierences be- [ w].[13]
tween semivowels correspond with the dierences be-
tween their related vowels.[5] In articulation and often diachronically, palatal approx-
Vowels and their corresponding semivowels alternate in imants correspond to front vowels, velar approximants
many languages depending on the phonological environ- to back vowels, and labialized approximants to rounded
ment, or for grammatical reasons, as is the case with Indo- vowels. In American English, the rhotic approximant
European ablaut. Similarly, languages often avoid con- corresponds to the rhotic vowel. This can create alter-
gurations where a semivowel precedes its correspond- nations (as shown in the above table).
ing vowel.[6] A number of phoneticians distinguish be- In addition to alternations, glides can be inserted to the
tween semivowels and approximants by their location in left or the right of their corresponding vowels when they
a syllable. Although he uses the terms interchangeably, occur next to a hiatus.[14] For example, in Ukrainian, me-
Montreuil (2004:104) remarks that, for example, the - dial /i/ triggers the formation of an inserted [j] that acts
nal glides of English par and buy dier from French par as a syllable onset so that when the ax /-ist/ is added to
('through') and baille ('tub') in that, in the latter pair, the ('football') to make 'football player',
approximants appear in the syllable coda, whereas, in the it is pronounced [futbo list], but ('Maoist'), with
former, they appear in the syllable nucleus. This means the same ax, is pronounced [mao jist] with a glide.[15]
that opaque (if not minimal) contrasts can occur in lan- Dutch for many speakers has a similar process that ex-
guages like Italian (with the i-like sound of piede 'foot', tends to mid vowels:[16]
appearing in the nucleus: [piede], and that of piano
'slow', appearing in the syllable onset: [pjano])[7] and bioscoop [bijskop] ('cinema')

4
2.3. CENTRAL APPROXIMANTS 5

zee + en [zej(n)] ('seas) the special letter ) has traditionally been labeled a
fricative, and no language is known to contrast it with
uor [yr] ('uor') a voiceless labialized velar fricative [x].[27] Similarly,
reu + en [r(n)] ('male dogs) Standard Tibetan has a voiceless lateral approximant, [l],
and Welsh has a voiceless lateral fricative [], but the
Rwanda [ruand] ('Rwanda')[17] distinction is not always clear from descriptions of these
languages. Again, no language is known to contrast the
Boaz [boas] ('Boaz')[17] two.[27] Iaai is reported to have an unusually large number
of voiceless approximants, with /l w /.
Similarly, vowels can be inserted next to their corre-
sponding glide in certain phonetic environments. Sievers For places of articulation further back in the mouth,
law describes this behaviour for Germanic. languages do not contrast voiced fricatives and approx-
imants. Therefore, the IPA allows the symbols for the
Non-high semivowels also occur. In colloquial Nepali voiced fricatives to double for the approximants, with or
speech, a process of glide-formation occurs, where one without a lowering diacritic.
of two adjacent vowels becomes non-syllabic; the pro-
cess includes mid vowels so that [do a] ('cause to wish') Occasionally, the glottal fricatives are called approx-
features a non-syllabic mid vowel.[18] Spanish features a imants, since [h] typically has no more frication than
similar process and even nonsyllabic /a/ can occur so that voiceless approximants, but they are often phonations of
ahorita ('right away') is pronounced [aoita].[19] It is not the glottis without any accompanying manner or place of
often clear, however, whether such sequences involve a articulation.
semivowel (a consonant) or a diphthong (a vowel), and in
many cases, it may not be a meaningful distinction.
Although many languages have central vowels [, ],
2.3 Central approximants
which lie between back/velar [, u] and front/palatal [i,
y], there are few cases of a corresponding approximant [ bilabial approximant [] (usually transcribed )
]. One is in the Korean diphthong [ i] or [i][20] though labiodental approximant []
it is more frequently analyzed as velar (as in the table
above), and Mapudungun may be another, with three high dental approximant [] (usually transcribed )
vowel sounds, /i/, /u/, // and three corresponding conso-
nants, /j/, and /w/, and a third one is often described as a alveolar approximant []
voiced unrounded velar fricative; some texts note a corre- retroex approximant [ ] (a consonantal [])
spondence between this approximant and // that is paral-
lel to /j//i/ and /w//u/. An example is liq /li/ ([li]?) palatal approximant [j] (a consonantal [i])
('white').[21]
velar approximant [] (a consonantal [])
uvular approximant [] (usually transcribed )
2.2 Approximants versus fricatives
pharyngeal approximant [] (a consonantal []; usu-
ally transcribed )
In addition to less turbulence, approximants also dif-
fer from fricatives in the precision required to pro- breathy-voiced glottal approximant []
duce them.[22] When emphasized, approximants may
be slightly fricated (that is, the airstream may become creaky-voiced glottal approximant []
slightly turbulent), which is reminiscent of fricatives.
For example, the Spanish word ayuda ('help') features a
palatal approximant that is pronounced as a fricative in 2.4 Lateral approximants
emphatic speech.[23] Spanish can be analyzed as having
a meaningful distinction between fricative, approximant, In lateral approximants, the center of tongue makes solid
and intermediate / j/.[24] However, such frication is contact with the roof of the mouth. However, the dening
generally slight and intermittent, unlike the strong turbu- location is the side of the tongue, which only approaches
lence of fricative consonants. the teeth.
Because voicelessness has comparatively reduced re-
sistance to air ow from the lungs, the increased air voiceless alveolar lateral approximant [l]
ow creates more turbulence, making acoustic distinc-
tions between voiceless approximants (which are ex- voiced alveolar lateral approximant [l]
tremely rare cross-linguistically[25] ) and voiceless frica- retroex lateral approximant []
tives dicult.[26] This is why, for example, the voiceless
labialized velar approximant [w ] (also transcribed with voiceless palatal lateral approximant []
6 CHAPTER 2. APPROXIMANT CONSONANT
voiced palatal lateral approximant []
velar lateral approximant []
uvular lateral approximant []
2.5 Coarticulated approximants
2.9 Notes
with dedicated IPA symbols
labialized velar approximant [w] (a consonantal [u])
labialized palatal approximant [] or [j] (a conso-
nantal [y])
2.6 Voiceless approximants
Voiceless approximants are rarely distinguished from
voiceless fricatives. Iaai has an unusually large number
of them, with /l w / contrasting with /l w/ (as well as
a large number of voiceless nasals). Attested voiceless
approximants are:[28]
voiceless alveolar lateral approximant [l]
voiceless velar lateral approximant []
voiceless labiodental approximant []
voiceless alveolar approximant []
voiceless palatal approximant [j]
voiceless labialized palatal approximant [] or [j]
voiceless velar approximant []
voiceless labialized velar approximant [] or [w ]
voiceless glottal approximant [h]
voiceless nasal glottal approximant [h]
2.7 Nasal approximants
(Not to be confused with 'nasal continuant', which is a
synonym for nasal consonant)
Examples are:
nasal palatal approximant [j]
nasal labialized velar approximant [w ]
voiceless nasal glottal approximant [h]
In Portuguese, the nasal glides [j] and [w ] historically
[22] Boersma (1997:12)
became // and /m/ in some words. In the Edo, the nasal-
ized allophones of the approximants /j/ and /w/ are nasal [23] Martnez-Celdrn (2004:204)
occlusives, [] and [].
What are transcribed as nasal approximants may include
non-syllabic elements of nasal vowels or diphthongs.
2.8 See also
List of phonetics topics
Semivowel
[1] Ladefoged (1975:277)
[2] Martnez-Celdrn (2004:201), citing Ladefoged & Mad-
dieson (1996)
[3] Martnez-Celdrn (2004:201)
[4] Martnez-Celdrn (2004:201), pointing to Ladefoged
(1964:25)
[5] Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:323), citing Maddieson &
Emmorey (1985)
[6] Rubach (2002:680), citing Kawasaki (1982)
[7] Montreuil (2004:104)
[8] Saporta (1956:288)
[9] Martnez-Celdrn (2004:202)
[10] Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:323)
[11] Hall, Best & Levitt (1999:283) citing Delattre & Free-
man (1968), Zawadzki & Kuehn (1980), and Boyce &
Espy-Wilson (1997)
[12] Both cited in Hamann (2003:2526)
[13] John Esling (2010) Phonetic Notation, in Hardcastle,
Laver & Gibbon (eds) The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences,
2nd ed., p 699.
[14] Rubach (2002:672)
[15] Rubach (2002:675676)
[16] Rubach (2002:677678)
[17] There is dialectal and allophonic variation in the realiza-
tion of //. For speakers who realize it as [], Rubach
(2002:683) postulates an additional rule that changes any
occurrence of [w] from glide insertion into [].
[18] Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:323324)
[19] Martnez-Celdrn, Fernndez-Planas & Carrera-Sabat
(2003:256257)
[20] Ahn & Iverson (2006)
[21] Listen to a recording Archived February 26, 2006, at the
Wayback Machine.
[24] Martnez-Celdrn, E. (2004) Problems in the classica-
tion of approximants. Journal of the International Pho-
netic Association, 34, 20110.
2.10. REFERENCES 7

[25] Blevins (2006:13) Martnez-Celdrn, Eugenio (2004), Problems in

the classication of approximants, Journal of the
[26] Ohala (1995:8)
International Phonetic Association, 34 (2): 201210,
[27] Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:326) doi:10.1017/S0025100304001732

[28] Bickford & Floyd (2006), augmented by sources at indi-
vidual articles for the glottal approximants
2.10 References
Martnez-Celdrn, Eugenio; Fernndez-Planas,
Ana Ma.; Carrera-Sabat, Josena (2003),
Castilian Spanish, Journal of the Interna-
tional Phonetic Association, 33 (2): 255259,
doi:10.1017/S0025100303001373

Montreuil, Jean-Pierre (2004), From velar codas to

Blevins, Juliette (2006), New perspec- high nuclei: phonetic and structural change in OT,
tives on English sound patterns: natural Probus, 16: 91111, doi:10.1515/prbs.2004.005
and unnatural in evolutionary phonology,
Journal of English Linguistics, 34: 625, Rubach, Jerzy (2002), Against subsegmental
doi:10.1177/0075424206287585 glides, Linguistic Inquiry, 33 (4): 672687,
doi:10.1162/ling.2002.33.4.672
Boersma, Paul (1997), Sound change in func-
tional phonology, Functional Phonology: Formaliz- Ohala, John (1995), Phonetic explanations for
ing the Interactions Between Articulatory and Percep- sound patterns: Implications for grammars of com-
tual Drives, The Hague: Holland Academic Graph- petence, Proceedings of the 16th International
ics Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 2, Stockholm, pp.
5259
Boyce, S.; Espy-Wilson, C. (1997), Coarticu-
latory stability in American English /r/", Jour- Saporta, Sol (1956), A Note on Spanish
nal of the Acoustical Society of America, 101 Semivowels, Language, 32 (2): 287290,
(6): 37413753, Bibcode:1997ASAJ..101.3741B, doi:10.2307/411006, JSTOR 411006
doi:10.1121/1.418333, PMID 9193061
Trask, Robert L. (1996), A Dictionary of Phonetics
Delattre, P.; Freeman, D.C. (1968), A dialect study and Phonology, London: Routledge
of American Rs by x-ray motion picture, Linguis-
tics, 44: 2968 Zawadski, P.A.; Kuehn, D.P. (1980), A cinera-
diographic study of static and dynamic aspects of
Hall, Pierre A.; Best, Catherine T.; Levitt, Andrea; American English /r/", Phonetica, 37 (4): 253266,
Andrea (1999), Phonetic vs. phonological inu- doi:10.1159/000259995, PMID 7443796
ences on French listeners perception of American
English approximants, Journal of Phonetics, 27 (3):
281306, doi:10.1006/jpho.1999.0097
Hamann, Silke (2003), The Phonetics and Phonol-
ogy of Retroexes, Utrecht, ISBN 90-76864-39-X
Kawasaki, Haruko (1982), An acoustical basis for
universal constraints on sound sequences (doctoral
dissertation), University of California, Berkeley
Ladefoged, Peter (1964), A Phonetic Study of West
African Languages, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press
Ladefoged, Peter (1975), A Course in Phonetics,
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The
Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
Maddieson, Ian; Emmorey, Karen (1985), Re-
lationship between semivowels and vowels:
Cross-linguistic investigations of acoustic dif-
ference and, Phonetica, 42 (4): 163174,
doi:10.1159/000261748, PMID 3842771
Chapter 3

Aspirated consonant

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath ration modier letter before the consonant symbol: p
that accompanies either the release or, in the case of represents the preaspirated bilabial stop.
preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, Unaspirated or tenuis consonants are occasionally
aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary
marked with the modier letter for unaspiration , a
distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in superscript equals sign: t. Usually, however, unaspi-
some other languages, notably most Indian and East Asian
rated consonants are left unmarked: t.
languages, the dierence is contrastive, while in Arabic
and Persian, all stops are aspirated.
To feel or see the dierence between aspirated and 3.2 Phonetics
unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle
in front of ones mouth, and say spin [spn] and then pin
Voiceless consonants are produced with the vocal folds
[pn]. One should either feel a pu of air or see a icker
open (spread) and not vibrating, and voiced consonants
of the candle ame with pin that one does not get with
are produced when the vocal folds are fractionally closed
spin.
and vibrating (modal voice). Voiceless aspiration occurs
when the vocal cords remain open after a consonant is
released. An easy way to measure this is by noting the
3.1 Transcription consonants voice-onset time, as the voicing of a following
vowel cannot begin until the vocal cords close.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), aspirated Phonetically in some languages, such as Navajo, aspira-
consonants are written using the symbols for voiceless tion of stops tends to be realised as voiceless velar airow;
consonants followed by the aspiration modier letter aspiration of aricates is realised as an extended length
, a superscript form of the symbol for the voiceless of the frication.
glottal fricative h. For instance, p represents the voice-
less bilabial stop, and p represents the aspirated bilabial Aspirated consonants are not always followed by vowels
stop. or other voiced sounds. For example, in Eastern Arme-
nian, aspiration is contrastive even word-nally, and aspi-
Voiced consonants are seldom actually aspirated. Sym- rated consonants occur in consonant clusters. In Wahgi,
bols for voiced consonants followed by , such as b, consonants are aspirated only in nal position.
typically represent consonants with murmured voiced
release (see below). In the grammatical tradition of
Sanskrit, aspirated consonants are called voiceless aspi- 3.2.1 Degree
rated, and breathy-voiced consonants are called voiced
aspirated. The degree of aspiration varies: the voice-onset time of
There are no dedicated IPA symbols for degrees of aspi- aspirated stops is longer or shorter depending on the lan-
ration and typically only two degrees are marked: unaspi- guage or the place of articulation.
rated k and aspirated k. An old symbol for light Armenian and Cantonese have aspiration that lasts about
aspiration was , but this is now obsolete. The aspira- as long as English aspirated stops, in addition to unaspi-
tion modier letter may be doubled to indicate especially rated stops. Korean has lightly aspirated stops that fall be-
strong or long aspiration. Hence, the two degrees of aspi- tween the Armenian and Cantonese unaspirated and as-
ration in Korean stops are sometimes transcribed k k pirated stops as well as strongly aspirated stops whose as-
or k and k, but they are usually transcribed [k] and piration lasts longer than that of Armenian or Cantonese.
[k],[1] with the details of voice-onset time given numer- (See voice-onset time.)
ically. Aspiration varies with place of articulation. The Span-
Preaspirated consonants are marked by placing the aspi- ish voiceless stops /p t k/ have voice-onset times (VOTs)

8
3.3. PHONOLOGY 9

of about 5, 10, and 30 milliseconds, whereas English as- 3.3 Phonology

pirated /p t k/ have VOTs of about 60, 70, and 80 ms.
Voice-onset time in Korean has been measured at 20, 25, Aspiration has varying signicance in dierent languages.
and 50 ms for /p t k/ and 90, 95, and 125 for /p t k/.[2] It is either allophonic or phonemic, and may be analyzed
as an underlying consonant cluster.

3.2.2 Doubling
3.3.1 Allophonic
When aspirated consonants are doubled or geminated, the
stop is held longer and then has an aspirated release. An In some languages, such as English, aspiration is
aspirated aricate consists of a stop, fricative, and aspi- allophonic. Stops are distinguished primarily by voicing,
rated release. A doubled aspirated aricate has a longer and voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated, while voiced
hold in the stop portion and then has a release consisting stops are usually unaspirated.
of the fricative and aspiration.
English voiceless stops are aspirated for most native
speakers when they are word-initial or begin a stressed
syllable, as in pill, till, kill.
3.2.3 Preaspiration
They are unaspirated for almost all speakers when imme-
Icelandic and Faroese have consonants with preaspiration diately following word-initial s, as in spill, still, skill. After
[p t k], and some scholars interpret them as consonant an s elsewhere in a word they are normally unaspirated
clusters as well. In Icelandic, preaspirated stops contrast as well, except sometimes in compound words. When
with double stops and single stops: the consonants in a cluster like st are analyzed as belong-
ing to dierent morphemes (heteromorphemic) the stop
is aspirated, but when they are analyzed as belonging to
kapp [kp] or [khp] zeal one morpheme the stop is unaspirated. For instance, dis-
tend has unaspirated [t] since it is not analyzed as two
gabb [kpp] hoax
morphemes, but distaste has an aspirated middle [t] be-
cause it is analyzed as dis- + taste and the word taste has
gap [kp] opening
an aspirated initial t.
Word-nal voiceless stops are sometimes aspirated.
Preaspirated stops also occur in most Sami languages.
For example, in Northern Sami, the unvoiced stop and Voiceless stops in Pashto are slightly aspirated prevocali-
aricate phonemes /p/, /t/, /ts/, /t/, /k/ are pronounced cally in a stressed syllable.
preaspirated ([p], [t] [ts], [t], [k]) in medial or nal
position.
3.3.2 Phonemic

3.2.4 Fricative In many languages, such as Armenian, Korean, Thai,

Although most aspirated obstruents in the worlds lan-
guages are stops and aricates, aspirated fricatives such
as [s], [f] or [] have been documented in Korean, in
a few Tibeto-Burman languages, in some Oto-Manguean
languages, and in the Siouan language Ofo. Some lan-
guages, such as Choni Tibetan, have up to four contrastive
aspirated fricatives [s] [], [] and [x].[3]
Indo-Aryan languages, Dravidian languages, Icelandic,
Ancient Greek, and the varieties of Chinese, tenuis and
aspirated consonants are phonemic. Unaspirated conso-
nants like [p s] and aspirated consonants like [p p s]
are separate phonemes, and words are distinguished by
whether they have one or the other.
Consonant cluster

Alemannic German dialects have unaspirated [p t k]

3.2.5 Voiced consonants with voiceless as- as well as aspirated [p t k]; the latter series are usually
piration viewed as consonant clusters.

True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to

murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the [b], Tenseness
[d], [] that are common in the languages of India, are
extremely rare. They have been documented in Kelabit[4] In Danish and most southern varieties of German, the
Taa, and the Kx'a languages. Reported aspirated voiced "lenis" consonants transcribed for historical reasons as b
stops, aricates and clicks are [bp , dt, dts, dt, k, d are distinguished from their fortis counterparts p t
q, , , , , ]. k, mainly in their lack of aspiration.
10 CHAPTER 3. ASPIRATED CONSONANT

3.3.3 Absence voiced /d/, and Western voiced /d/ corresponds to East-
ern voiceless /t/.
French,[5] Standard Dutch,[6] Tamil, Italian, Russian,
Spanish, Modern Greek, and Latvian are languages that
do not have aspirated consonants. 3.4.4 Greek
Main article: Ancient Greek phonology
3.4 Examples
Some forms of Greek before the Koine Greek period are
reconstructed as having aspirated stops. The Classical At-
3.4.1 Chinese tic dialect of Ancient Greek had a three-way distinction
in stops like Eastern Armenian: /t t d/. These series were
Standard Chinese (Mandarin) has stops and aricates dis- called , , (psil, dasa, msa) smooth,
tinguished by aspiration: for instance, /t t/, /ts ts/.
In rough, intermediate, respectively, by Koine Greek gram-
pinyin, tenuis stops are written with letters that represent marians.
voiced consonants in English, and aspirated stops with
letters that represent voiceless consonants. Thus d repre- There were aspirated stops at three places of articulation:
sents /t/, and t represents /t/. labial, coronal, and velar /p t k/. Earlier Greek, repre-
sented by Mycenaean Greek, likely had a labialized velar
Wu Chinese and Southern Min has a three-way distinc- aspirated stop /k/, which later became labial, coronal,
tion in stops and aricates: /p p b/. In addition to as- or velar depending on dialect and phonetic environment.
pirated and unaspirated consonants, there is a series of
muddy consonants, like /b/. These are pronounced with The other Ancient Greek dialects, Ionic, Doric, Aeolic,
slack or breathy voice: that is, they are weakly voiced. and Arcadocypriot, likely had the same three-way distinc-
Muddy consonants as initial cause a syllable to be pro- tion at one point, but Doric seems to have had a fricative
nounced with low pitch or light ( yng) tone. in place of /t/ in the Classical period, and the Ionic and
Aeolic dialects sometimes lost aspiration (psilosis).
Later, during the Koine Greek period, the aspirated and
3.4.2 Indian languages voiced stops /t d/ of Attic Greek lenited to voiceless and
voiced fricatives, yielding / / in Medieval and Modern
Main articles: Indo-Aryan languages Charts, and Greek.
Dravidian languages Phonology

Many Indo-Aryan languages have aspirated stops. 3.5 Other uses

Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Gujarati have a
four-way distinction in stops: voiceless, aspirated, voiced,
and breathy-voiced or voiced aspirated, such as /p p b
3.5.1 Debuccalization
b/. Punjabi has lost breathy-voiced consonants, which
The term aspiration sometimes refers to the sound change
resulted in a tone system, and therefore has a distinction
of debuccalization, in which a consonant is lenited (weak-
between voiceless, aspirated, and voiced: /p p b/.
ened) to become a glottal stop or fricative [ h ].
Some of the Dravidian languages, such as Telugu, Tamil,
Malayalam, and Kannada, have a distinction between
voiced and voiceless, aspirated and unaspirated only in 3.5.2 Breathy-voiced release
loanwords from Indo-Aryan languages. In native Dravid-
ian words, there is no distinction between these categories Main article: Breathy voice
and stops are underspecied for voicing and aspiration.
So-called voiced aspirated consonants are nearly al-
ways pronounced instead with breathy voice, a type of
3.4.3 Armenian phonation or vibration of the vocal folds. The modier
letter after a voiced consonant actually represents
Most dialects of Armenian have aspirated stops, and a breathy-voiced or murmured dental stop, as with the
some have breathy-voiced stops. voiced aspirated bilabial stop b in the Indo-Aryan
Classical and Eastern Armenian have a three-way distinc- languages. This consonant is therefore more accurately
tion between voiceless, aspirated, and voiced, such as /t transcribed as b, with the diacritic for breathy voice,
t d/. or with the modier letter b, a superscript form of the
Western Armenian has a two-way distinction between as- symbol for the voiced glottal fricative .
pirated and voiced: /t d/. Western Armenian aspirated Some linguists restrict the double-dot subscript to
/t/ corresponds to Eastern Armenian aspirated /t/ and murmured sonorants, such as vowels and nasals, which
3.8. REFERENCES 11

are murmured throughout their duration, and use the su-

perscript hook-aitch for the breathy-voiced release
of obstruents.

3.6 See also

Aspirated h

Voice-onset time
List of phonetic topics

Phonation
Preaspiration

Rough breathing
Smooth breathing

Breathy voice
Tenuis consonant (Unaspirated consonant)

3.7 Notes
[1] Ladefoged, Peter; Barbara Blankenship; Russell G.
Schuh, eds. (21 April 2009). Korean. UCLA Phonet-
ics Archive. Retrieved 20 February 2015. word lists from
1977, 1966, 1975.

[2] Lisker and Abramson (1964). A cross-language Study of

Voicing in Initial Stops. Word. 20: 384422.

[3] Guillaume Jacques 2011. A panchronic study of aspi-

rated fricatives, with new evidence from Pumi, Lingua
121.9:1518-1538

[4] Robert Blust, 2006, The Origin of the Kelabit Voiced

Aspirates: A Historical Hypothesis Revisited, Oceanic
Linguistics 45:311

[5] Tranel, Bernard (1987). The sounds of French: an in-

troduction (3rd ed.). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 129130. ISBN 0-521-31510-7.

[6] Frans Hinskens, Johan Taeldeman, Language and

space: Dutch, Walter de Gruyter 2014. 3110261332,
9783110261332, p.66

3.8 References
Cho, T., & Ladefoged, P., Variations and univer-
sals in VOT. In Fieldwork Studies of Targeted Lan-
guages V: UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics vol.
95. 1997.
Chapter 4
Flap consonant
In phonetics, a ap or tap is a type of consonantal sound,
which is produced with a single contraction of the mus-
cles so that one articulator (such as the tongue) is thrown
against another.
4.1 Contrast with stops and trills
The main dierence between a ap and a stop is that in a
ap there is no buildup of air pressure behind the place of
articulation and consequently no release burst. Otherwise
a ap is similar to a brief stop.
Flaps also contrast with trills, where the airstream causes
the articulator to vibrate. Trills may be realized as a sin-
gle contact, like a ap, but are variable, whereas a ap
is limited to a single contact. When a trill is brief and
made with a single contact it is sometimes erroneously
described as an (allophonic) ap, but a true ap is an ac-
tive articulation whereas a trill is a passive articulation.
That is, for a tap or ap the tongue makes an active ges-
ture to contact the target place of articulation, whereas
with a trill the contact is due to the vibration caused by
the airstream rather than any active movement.
4.2 Tap vs. ap
Many linguists use the terms tap and ap indiscrimi-
nately. Peter Ladefoged proposed for a while that it might
be useful to distinguish between them. However, his us-
age was inconsistent, contradicting itself even between
dierent editions of the same text.[1] One proposed ver-
sion of the distinction was that a tap strikes its point
of contact directly, as a very brief stop, whereas a ap
strikes the point of contact tangentially: Flaps are most
typically made by retracting the tongue tip behind the
alveolar ridge and moving it forward so that it strikes the
ridge in passing. Later, however, he used the term ap
in all cases.[2] Subsequent work on the labiodental ap
has claried the issue: aps involve retraction of the ac-
tive articulator, and a forward-striking movement.[3] For
linguists that do make the distinction, the alveolar tap is
transcribed as a sh-hook ar, [], and while the ap can contrasting it with a trill: pero /peo/ but vs. perro
12
be transcribed as a small capital dee, [], which is not
recognized by the IPA.[4] In IPA terms the retroex ap
[] symbol captures the initial retraction and subsequent
forward movement of the tongue tip involved. Otherwise
alveolars are typically called taps, and other articulations
aps. No language has been conrmed to contrast a tap
and a ap at the same place of articulation. However,
such a distinction has been claimed for Norwegian, where
the alveolar apical tap // and the post-alveolar/retroex
apical ap // do not dier in place for all speakers.[5]
4.3 IPA symbols
The ap and tap consonants identied by the International
Phonetic Alphabet are:
The Kiel Convention of the IPA recommended that for
other aps, a homorganic consonant, such as a stop or
trill, should be used with a breve diacritic:
Tap or aps: where no independent symbol
for a tap is provided, the breve diacritic should
be used, e.g. [] or [n ].[6]
However, the former could be mistaken for a short trill,
and is more clearly transcribed , whereas for a nasal
tap the unambiguous transcription is generally used.
4.4 Types of aps
Most of the alternative transcriptions in parentheses im-
ply a tap rather than ap articulation, so for example the
ap [] and the tapped stop [b] are arguably distinct, as
are apped [] and tapped [].
4.4.1 Alveolar aps
Main article: Alveolar ap
Spanish features a good illustration of an alveolar ap,
4.4. TYPES OF FLAPS 13

/pero/ dog. Among the Germanic languages, this languages of New Guinea.
allophone occurs in American and Australian English and
in Northern Low Saxon. In American and Australian En-
glish it tends to be an allophone of intervocalic /t/ (as in Transcription
butter, later, fattest and total) see intervocalic
alveolar apping. In a number of Low Saxon dialects The retroex lateral ap does not have an ocially rec-
it occurs as an allophone of intervocalic /d/ or /t/; e.g. ognized symbol in the IPA. However, an ad hoc sym-
bden /beeden/ [ben] to pray, to request, gah to bol based on the alveolar lateral ap may occasionally be
Bedde! /gaa tou bede/ [tobee] go to bed!, seen:
Water /vaater/ [v] water, Vadder /fater/ [fa]
father. (In some dialects this has resulted in reanalysis
and a shift to /r/; thus bren [bern], to Berre [tobere],
Warer [vr], Varrer [far].) Occurrence varies; in
some Low Saxon dialects it aects both /t/ and /d/, while
in others it aects only /d/. Other languages with this are
Portuguese, Korean, and Austronesian languages with /r/.
In Galician, Portuguese and Sardinian, a ap often ap-
pears instead of a former /l/. This is part of a wider phe-
nomenon called rhotacism.
Such derived symbols are becoming more frequent now
4.4.2 Retroex aps that font-editing software is widely accessible. Note that
besides not being sanctioned by the IPA, there is no
Unicode value for it. However, the retroex lateral ap
Most Indic and Dravidian languages have retroex aps.
may be written in Unicode-compliant fashion as a digraph
In Hindi there are three, a simple retroex ap as in
of the alveolar lateral ap [] with the right-tail diacritic,
[b] big, a murmured retroex ap as in [koi] leper,
[].
and a retroex nasal ap in the Hindicized pronuncia-
tion of Sanskrit [mi] ruby. Some of these may be The palatal and velar lateral aps may be represented with
allophonic. a short diacritic over the letter for the homorganic approx-
imant, although the diacritic would need to appear under
A retroex ap is also common in Norwegian dialects and
the palatal due to its ascender: [, ].
some Swedish dialects.

4.4.3 Lateral aps 4.4.4 Non-coronal aps

The only common non-coronal ap is the labiodental
Many of the languages of Africa, Asia, and the Pacic
ap, found throughout central Africa in languages such
that don't distinguish [r] from [l] may have a lateral ap.
as Margi. In 2005, the IPA adopted a right-hook v,
However, it is also possible that many of these languages
do not have a lateral-central contrast at all, so that even
a consistently neutral articulation may be perceived as
sometimes lateral [] or [l], sometimes central []. This
has been suggested to be the case for Japanese, for exam-
ple. for this sound. (Supported by some fonts: [].) Previ-
The Iwaidja language of Australia has both alveolar and ously, it had been transcribed with the use of the breve
retroex lateral aps. These contrast with lateral approx- diacritic, [v ], or other ad hoc symbols.
imants at the same positions, as well as a retroex tap Other aps are much less common. They include an
[], alveolar tap [], and retroex approximant []. How- epiglottal ap; a bilabial ap in Banda, which may be an
ever, the apped, or tapped, laterals in Iwaidja are distinct allophone of the labiodental ap; and a velar lateral ap as
from 'lateral aps as represented by the corresponding an allophone in Kanite and Melpa. These are often tran-
IPA symbols (see below). These phones consist of a ap scribed with the breve diacritic, as [w , ]. Note here that,
component followed by a lateral component, whereas In like a velar trill, a central velar ap or tap is not possible
Iwaidja the opposite is the case. For this reason, current because the tongue and soft palate cannot move together
IPA transcriptions of these sounds by linguists working easily enough to produce a sound.
on the language consist of an alveolar lateral followed by
If other aps are found, the breve diacritic could be used
a superscript alveolar tap and a retroex lateral followed
to represent them, but would more properly be combined
by a superscript retroex tap. with the symbol for the corresponding voiced stop. A
A velar lateral ap may exist as an allophone in a few palatal or uvular ap, which unlike a velar ap is believed
14 CHAPTER 4. FLAP CONSONANT

to be articulatorily possible, could be represented this way 4.7 External links

(by *[, ~]).[8]
List of phonetics topics

4.4.5 Nasal aps A Crosslinguistic Lexicon of the Labial Flap

Nasal consonants include aps, although these are rarely

phonemic. Many West African languages have a nasal
ap [] (or [n ]) as an allophone of // before a nasal vowel;
Pashto, however, has a phonemic nasal retroex lateral
ap.

4.4.6 Tapped fricatives

Voiced and voiceless tapped alveolar fricatives have been

reported from a few languages. Flapped fricatives are
possible but do not seem to be used.[9] See voiced alveolar
tapped fricative, voiceless alveolar tapped fricative.

4.5 Notes
[1] Ladefoged, P. (1975, 1982, 1993) A Course in Phonetics.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1st, 2nd & 3rd editions

[2] Spaji, Ladefoged & Bhaskararao (1996), 'The Trills of

Toda', Journal of the International Phonetic Association,
26:1-21. p. 2

[3] Olson, K. S. & Hajek, J. (2003). Crosslinguistic insights

on the labial ap, Linguistic Typology, 7: 157186.

[4] Ladefoged, P. (1971). Preliminaries to Linguistic Phonet-

ics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971.

[5] Moen et al. (2003) The Articulation of the East Norwe-

gian Apical Liquids / /"

[6] Report on the Kiel Convention, Journal of the Interna-

tional Phonetic Association 19:2, p 70.

[7] Bickford & Floyd (2006) Articulatory Phonetics, Table

25.1, augmented by sources at the articles on individual
consonants.

[8] The IPA has recommended , but that could be confused

with an extra-short (e.g. one-contact) trill. is less am-
biguous, because articulatorily aps are extra-short stops.

[9] Laver (1994) Principles of Phonetics, p. 263.

4.6 References

Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The

Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
Chapter 5

Fricative consonant

Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air [] voiced palato-alveolar sibilant (domed, partially
through a narrow channel made by placing two palatalized), as the s in English vision
articulators close together. These may be the lower lip
against the upper teeth, in the case of [f]; the back of the [] voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant (laminal,
tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German [x] palatalized)
(the nal consonant of Bach); or the side of the tongue [] voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant (laminal, palatal-
against the molars, in the case of Welsh [] (appearing ized)
twice in the name Llanelli). This turbulent airow is
called frication. A particular subset of fricatives are the [] voiceless retroex sibilant (apical or subapical)
sibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing
air through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue [] voiced retroex sibilant (apical or subapical)
is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of
the teeth. English [s], [z], [], and [] are examples of All sibilants are coronal, but may be dental, alveolar,
sibilants. postalveolar, or palatal (retroex) within that range.
The usage of two other terms is less standardized: However, at the postalveolar place of articulation, the
"Spirant" can be a synonym of fricative, or (as in e.g. tongue may take several shapes: domed, laminal, or
Uralic linguistics) refer to non-sibilant fricatives only. apical, and each of these is given a separate symbol and a
"Strident" could mean just sibilant, but some authors separate name. Prototypical retroexes are subapical and
include also labiodental, lateral or uvular fricatives in the palatal, but they are usually written with the same symbol
class. as the apical postalveolars. The alveolars and dentals may
also be either apical or laminal, but this dierence is in-
dicated with diacritics rather than with separate symbols.

5.1 Types
5.1.2 Central non-sibilant fricatives
5.1.1 Sibilants [] voiceless bilabial fricative
[s] voiceless coronal sibilant, as in English sip [] voiced bilabial fricative
[z] voiced coronal sibilant, as in English zip [f] voiceless labiodental fricative, as in English ne

[s] ejective coronal sibilant [v] voiced labiodental fricative, as in English vine

[s] voiceless dental sibilant [] voiceless linguolabial fricative

[z] voiced dental sibilant [] voiced linguolabial fricative

[], [] voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative, as in

[s] voiceless apical sibilant
[z] voiced apical sibilant
[s] voiceless postalveolar sibilant (laminal)
[z] voiced postalveolar sibilant (laminal)
[] voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant (domed, par-
tially palatalized), as in English ship
English thing
[], [] voiced dental non-sibilant fricative, as in En-
glish that
[], [] voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative
[], [] voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative
[r] voiceless trilled fricative

15
16 CHAPTER 5. FRICATIVE CONSONANT

[r] voiced trilled fricative No language distinguishes voiced fricatives from

[] voiceless palatal fricative
[] voiced palatal fricative
[x] voiceless velar fricative
[] voiced velar fricative
[] voiceless palatal-velar fricative (articulation dis-
puted)
[] voiceless uvular fricative
approximants at these places, so the same symbol is
used for both. For the pharyngeal, approximants are
more numerous than fricatives. A fricative realization
may be specied by adding the uptack to the letters, [,
]. Likewise, the downtack may be added to specify an
approximant realization, [, ].
(The bilabial approximant and dental approximant do not
have dedicated symbols either and are transcribed in a
similar fashion: [, ]. However, the base letters are un-
derstood to specically refer to the fricatives.)

[] voiceless pharyngeal fricative

5.1.5 Pseudo-fricatives
The IPA also has letters for epiglottal fricatives,
[h] voiceless glottal transition, as in English hat

[] voiceless epiglottal fricative

[] breathy-voiced glottal transition
[] voiced epiglottal fricative

In many languages, such as English, the glottal frica-

with allophonic trilling, but these might be better ana- tives are unaccompanied phonation states of the glot-
lyzed as pharyngeal trills. [1]
5.1.3 Lateral fricatives
[] voiceless dental lateral fricative
[] voiced dental lateral fricative
[] voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
tis, without any accompanying manner, fricative or oth-
erwise. However, in languages such as Arabic, they are
true fricatives.[2]
In addition, [] is usually called a "voiceless labial-velar
fricative", but it is actually an approximant. True dou-
bly articulated fricatives may not occur in any language;
but see voiceless palatal-velar fricative for a putative (and
rather controversial) example.

[] voiced alveolar lateral fricative

5.1.6 Aspirated fricatives
[] voiceless postalveolar lateral fricative (Mehri)

[] or [ ] voiceless retroex lateral fricative Fricatives are very commonly voiced, though cross-
linguistically voiced fricatives are not nearly as common
[] or [] voiceless palatal lateral fricative (also as tenuis (plain) fricatives. Other phonations are com-
written ) mon in languages that have those phonations in their stop
consonants. However, phonemically aspirated fricatives
[] voiceless velar lateral fricative (also written ) are rare. [s] contrasts with [s] in Korean; aspirated frica-
tives are also found in a few Sino-Tibetan languages, in
[] voiced velar lateral fricative
some Oto-Manguean languages, and in the Siouan lan-
guage Ofo (/s/ and /f/). The record may be Cone Ti-
The lateral fricative occurs as the ll of Welsh, as in Lloyd, betan, which has four contrastive aspirated fricatives: /s/
Llewelyn, and Machynlleth ([maxn], a town), as the //, //, and /x/.[3]
unvoiced 'hl' and voiced 'dl' or 'dhl' in the several lan-
guages of Southern Africa (such as Xhosa and Zulu), and
in Mongolian.
5.1.7 Nasalized fricatives

5.1.4 IPA letters used for both fricatives Phonemically nasalized fricatives are rare. Some South
and approximants Arabian languages have /z/, Umbundu has //, and Kwan-
gali and Souletin Basque have /h/. In Coatzospan Mixtec,
[] voiced uvular fricative [, , s, ] appear allophonically before a nasal vowel, and
in Igbo nasality is a feature of the syllable; when /f v s z
[] voiced pharyngeal fricative / occur in nasal syllables they are themselves nasalized.[4]
5.4. REFERENCES 17

5.2 Occurrence 5.4 References

H is not a fricative in English (see /h/). [1] John Esling (2010) Phonetic Notation, in Hardcastle,
Laver & Gibbon (eds) The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences,
Until its extinction, Ubykh may have been the language 2nd ed., p 695.
with the most fricatives (29 not including /h/), some of
which did not have dedicated symbols or diacritics in the [2] Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of
the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-
IPA. This number actually outstrips the number of all
19814-8.
consonants in English (which has 24 consonants). By
contrast, approximately 8.7% of the worlds languages [3] Guillaume Jacques 2011. A panchronic study of aspi-
have no phonemic fricatives at all.[6] This is a typical fea- rated fricatives, with new evidence from Pumi, Lingua
ture of Australian Aboriginal languages, where the few 121.9:1518-1538
fricatives that exist result from changes to plosives or
[4] Laver (1994: 255256) Principles of Phonetics
approximants, but also occurs in some indigenous lan-
guages of New Guinea and South America that have es- [5] There are likely to be more aspirated, murmured and nasal
pecially small numbers of consonants. However, whereas fricatives than shown here. s are not IPA transcription
[h] is entirely unknown in indigenous Australian lan-
[6] Maddieson, Ian. 2008. "Absence of Common Conso-
guages, most of the other languages without true frica-
nants". In: Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew S. &
tives do have [h] in their consonant inventory.
Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) The World Atlas of
Voicing contrasts in fricatives are largely conned to Eu- Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital
rope, Africa, and Western Asia. Languages of South and Library, chapter 18. Accessed on 2008-09-15.
East Asia, such as the Dravidian and Austronesian lan-
[7] Maddieson, Ian. Voicing in Plosives and Fricatives, in
guages, typically do not have such voiced fricatives as [z] Martin Haspelmath et al. (eds.) The World Atlas of Lan-
and [v], which are familiar to many European speakers. guage Structures, pp. 2629. Oxford: Oxford University
These voiced fricatives are also relatively rare in indige- Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-925591-1.
nous languages of the Americas. Overall, voicing con-
trasts in fricatives are much rarer than in plosives, being [8] Maddieson, Ian. Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge Univer-
found only in about a third of the worlds languages as sity Press, 1984. ISBN 0-521-26536-3.
compared to 60 percent for plosive voicing contrasts.[7]
About 15 percent of the worlds languages, however, have
unpaired voiced fricatives, i.e. a voiced fricative without a
5.5 External links
voiceless counterpart. Two-thirds of these, or 10 percent
of all languages, have unpaired voiced fricatives but no Fricatives in English
voicing contrast between any fricative pair.[8]
This phenomenon occurs because voiced fricatives have
developed from lenition of plosives or fortition of approx-
imants. This phenomenon of unpaired voiced fricatives
is scattered throughout the world, but is conned to non-
sibilant fricatives with the exception of a couple of lan-
guages that have [] but lack []. (Relatedly, several lan-
guages have the voiced aricate [d] but lack [t].) The
fricatives that occur most often without a voiceless coun-
terpart are in order of ratio of unpaired occurrences to
total occurrences [], [], [], [] and [].

5.3 See also

Apical consonant

Hush consonant

Laminal consonant

List of phonetics topics

Chapter 6

Fundamental frequency

0 1 Where x(t) is the value of the waveform at t. This means

that this equation and a denition of the waveforms val-
ues over any interval of length T is all that is required to
1/2
describe the waveform completely.
Every waveform may be described using any multiple of
1/3
this period. There exists a smallest period over which the
function may be described completely and this period is
1/4 the fundamental period. The fundamental frequency is
dened as its reciprocal:
1/5

1
f0 =
1/6 T
Since the period is measured in units of time, then the
1/7

Vibration and standing waves in a string, The fundamental and

the rst six overtones

The fundamental frequency, often referred to simply

as the fundamental, is dened as the lowest frequency
of a periodic waveform. In music, the fundamental is
the musical pitch of a note that is perceived as the lowest F0leftclosed
partial present. In terms of a superposition of sinusoids
(e.g. Fourier series), the fundamental frequency is the units for frequency are 1/time. 1
When the time units are
lowest frequency sinusoidal in the sum. In some contexts, seconds, the frequency is in s , also known as Hertz.
the fundamental is usually abbreviated as f 0 (or FF), in-
dicating the lowest frequency counting from zero.[1][2][3]
In other contexts, it is more common to abbreviate it as
f 1 , the rst harmonic.[4][5][6][7][8] (The second harmonic
is then f2 = 2f1 , etc. In this context, the zeroth harmonic
would be 0 Hz.)

6.1 Explanation F0rightclosed

All sinusoidal and many non-sinusoidal waveforms are For a tube of length L with one end closed and the other
periodic, which is to say they repeat exactly over time. end open the wavelength of the fundamental harmonic is
The period of a waveform is the T for which the follow- 4L, as indicated by the top two animations on the right.
ing equation is true: Hence,

x(t) = x(t + T ) all for t R 0 = 4L.

18
6.3. MECHANICAL SYSTEMS 19

Therefore, using the relation of a string or air column, or a higher harmonic chosen by
the player. The fundamental is one of the harmonics. A
v harmonic is any member of the harmonic series, an ideal
0 = set of frequencies that are positive integer multiples of
f0
a common fundamental frequency. The reason a funda-
where v is the speed of the wave, we can nd the funda- mental is also considered a harmonic is because it is 1
mental frequency in terms of the speed of the wave and times itself. [9]
the length of the tube:
The fundamental is the frequency at which the entire
wave vibrates. Overtones are other sinusoidal compo-
v
f0 = . nents present at frequencies above the fundamental. All
4L of the frequency components that make up the total wave-
If the ends of the same tube are now both closed or both form, including the fundamental and the overtones, are
called partials. Together they form the harmonic series.
Overtones which are perfect integer multiples of the fun-
damental are called harmonics. When an overtone is near
to being harmonic, but not exact, it is sometimes called a
harmonic partial, although they are often referred to sim-
ply as harmonics. Sometimes overtones are created that
are not anywhere near a harmonic, and are just called par-
tials or inharmonic overtones.

F0bothclosed The fundamental frequency is considered the rst har-

monic and the rst partial. The numbering of the partials
and harmonics is then usually the same; the second partial
is the second harmonic, etc. But if there are inharmonic
partials, the numbering no longer coincides. Overtones
are numbered as they appear above the fundamental. So
strictly speaking, the rst overtone is the second partial
(and usually the second harmonic). As this can result
in confusion, only harmonics are usually referred to by
their numbers, and overtones and partials are described
by their relationships to those harmonics.
F0bothopen

opened as in the bottom two animations on the right, the 6.3 Mechanical systems
wavelength of the fundamental harmonic becomes 2L. By
the same method as above, the fundamental frequency is
found to be Consider a spring, xed at one end and having a mass at-
tached to the other; this would be a single degree of free-
dom (SDoF) oscillator. Once set into motion it will oscil-
v late at its natural frequency. For a single degree of free-
f0 = .
2L dom oscillator, a system in which the motion can be de-
At 20 C (68 F) the speed of sound in air is 343 m/s scribed by a single coordinate, the natural frequency de-
(1129 ft/s). This speed is temperature dependent and pends on two system properties: mass and stiness; (pro-
does increase at a rate of 0.6 m/s for each degree Cel- viding the system is undamped). The radian frequency,
sius increase in temperature (1.1 ft/s for every increase , can be found using the following equation:
of 1 F).
The velocity of a sound wave at dierent temperatures:-
k
n2 =
v = 343.2 m/s at 20 C m
v = 331.3 m/s at 0 C Where:
k = stiness of the spring
m = mass
6.2 In music = radian frequency (radians per second)
From the radian frequency, the natural frequency, f , can
In music, the fundamental is the musical pitch of a note be found by simply dividing by 2. Without rst nd-
that is perceived as the lowest partial present. The fun- ing the radian frequency, the natural frequency can be
damental may be created by vibration over the full length found directly using:
20 CHAPTER 6. FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY

1 k
fn =
2 m
Where:
f = natural frequency in hertz (cycles/second)
k = stiness of the spring (Newtons/meter or N/m)
m = mass(kg)
while doing the modal analysis of structures and mechan-
ical equipment, the frequency of 1st mode is called fun-
damental frequency.

6.4 See also

Hertz

Missing fundamental
Natural frequency

Oscillation
Harmonic series (music)#Terminology

Pitch detection algorithm

Scale of harmonics

6.5 References
[1] sidfn. Phon.ucl.ac.uk. Retrieved 2012-11-27.

[2] Phonetics and Theory of Speech Production. Acous-

tics.hut.. Retrieved 2012-11-27.

[3] Fundamental Frequency of Continuous Signals (PDF).

Fourier.eng.hmc.edu. Retrieved 2012-11-27.

[4] Standing Wave in a Tube II - Finding the Fun-

damental Frequency (PDF). Nchsdduncanap-
physics.wikispaces.com. Retrieved 2012-11-27.

[5] Physics: Standing Waves (PDF). Physics.kennesaw.edu.

Retrieved 2012-11-27.

[6] Phys 1240: Sound and Music (PDF). Colorado.edu.

Retrieved 2012-11-27.

[7] Standing Waves on a String. Hyperphysics.phy-

astr.gsu.edu. Retrieved 2012-11-27.

[8] Creating musical sounds - OpenLearn - Open Univer-

sity. Open University. Retrieved 2014-06-04.

[9] John R. Pierce (2001). Consonance and Scales. In

Perry R. Cook. Music, Cognition, and Computerized
Sound. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-53190-0.
Chapter 7

Harmonic

This article is about the components of periodic signals. various disciplines, including music and acoustics, elec-
For other uses, see Harmonic (disambiguation). tronic power transmission, radio technology, etc. It is
The term harmonic in its strictest sense describes any typically applied to repeating signals, such as sinusoidal
waves. A harmonic of such a wave is a wave with a
frequency that is a positive integer multiple of the fre-
quency of the original wave, known as the fundamental
1/2
frequency. The original wave is also called 1st harmonic,
the following harmonics are known as higher harmon-
ics. As all harmonics are periodic at the fundamental
1/3 2/3 frequency, the sum of harmonics is also periodic at that
frequency. For example, if the fundamental frequency is
50 Hz, a common AC power supply frequency, the fre-
1/4 3/4
quencies of the rst three higher harmonics are 100 Hz
(2nd harmonic), 150 Hz (3rd harmonic), 200 Hz (4th har-
1/5 2/5 3/5 4/5
monic) and any addition of waves with these frequencies
is periodic at 50 Hz.

1/6 5/6

7.1 Characteristics
1/7 2/7 3/7 4/7 5/7 6/7

Most acoustic instruments emit complex tones contain-

0 1/7 1/6 1/5 1/4 2/7 1/3 2/5 3/7 1/2 4/7 3/5 2/3 5/7 3/4 4/5 5/6 6/7 1
ing many individual partials (component simple tones or
sinusoidal waves), but the untrained human ear typically
The nodes of a vibrating string are harmonics. does not perceive those partials as separate phenomena.
Rather, a musical note is perceived as one sound, the qual-
ity or timbre of that sound being a result of the relative
strengths of the individual partials.
Many acoustic oscillators, such as the human voice or a
bowed violin string, produce complex tones that are more
or less periodic, and thus are composed of partials that
are near matches to integer multiples of the fundamen-
tal frequency and therefore resemble the ideal harmonics
and are called harmonic partials or simply harmonics
for convenience (although its not strictly accurate to call
a partial a harmonic, the rst being real and the second
being ideal). Oscillators that produce harmonic partials
behave somewhat like 1-dimensional resonators, and are
often long and thin, such as a guitar string or a column
of air open at both ends (as with the modern orchestral
Two dierent notations of natural harmonics on the cello. transverse ute). Wind instruments whose air column
First as sounded (more common), then as ngered (easier to is open at only one end, such as trumpets and clarinets,
sightread). also produce partials resembling harmonics. However
they only produce partials matching the odd harmonics, at
member of the harmonic series. The term is employed in least in theory. The reality of acoustic instruments is such

21
22 CHAPTER 7. HARMONIC

that none of them behaves as perfectly as the somewhat string of a cello produces the same pitch as lightly n-
simplied theoretical models would predict.
Partials whose frequencies are not integer multiples of the string. For the human voice see Overtone singing, which
fundamental are referred to as inharmonic partials.
Some acoustic instruments emit a mix of harmonic and
inharmonic partials but still produce an eect on the ear
of having a denite fundamental pitch, such as pianos,
strings plucked pizzicato, vibraphones, marimbas, and
certain pure-sounding bells or chimes. Antique singing
bowls are known for producing multiple harmonic par-
tials or multiphonics. [1] [2]
Other oscillators, such as cymbals, drum heads, and other
percussion instruments, naturally produce an abundance
of inharmonic partials and do not imply any particular
pitch, and therefore cannot be used melodically or har-
monically in the same way other instruments can.
7.2 Partials, overtones, and har-
monics
gering the node 1 3 of the way down the second highest
uses harmonics.
While it is true that electronically produced periodic
tones (e.g. square waves or other non-sinusoidal waves)
have harmonics that are whole number multiples of the
fundamental frequency, practical instruments do not all
have this characteristic. For example, higher harmon-
ics"' of piano notes are not true harmonics but are over-
tones and can be very sharp, i.e. a higher frequency than
given by a pure harmonic series. This is especially true of
instruments other than stringed or brass/woodwind ones,
e.g., xylophone, drums, bells etc., where not all the over-
tones have a simple whole number ratio with the funda-
mental frequency.
The fundamental frequency is the reciprocal of the period
of the periodic phenomenon.
This article incorporates public domain material from
the General Services Administration document Federal
Standard 1037C.

An overtone is any partial higher than the lowest par- 7.3 Harmonics on stringed instru-
tial in a compound tone. The relative strengths and fre-
quency relationships of the component partials determine ments
the timbre of an instrument. The similarity between the
terms overtone and partial sometimes leads to their be-
ing loosely used interchangeably in a musical context,
but they are counted dierently, leading to some possi-
ble confusion. In the special case of instrumental tim-
bres whose component partials closely match a harmonic
series (such as with most strings and winds) rather than
being inharmonic partials (such as with most pitched per-
cussion instruments), it is also convenient to call the com-
ponent partials harmonics but not strictly correct (be-
cause harmonics are numbered the same even when miss-
ing, while partials and overtones are only counted when
present). This chart demonstrates how the three types of
names (partial, overtone, and harmonic) are counted (as-
suming that the harmonics are present):
In many musical instruments, it is possible to play the
upper harmonics without the fundamental note being
present. In a simple case (e.g., recorder) this has the
eect of making the note go up in pitch by an octave,
but in more complex cases many other pitch variations #
are obtained. In some cases it also changes the timbre
of the note. This is part of the normal method of ob-
taining higher notes in wind instruments, where it is Playing a harmonic on a string
called overblowing. The extended technique of playing
multiphonics also produces harmonics. On string instru- The following table displays the stop points on a stringed
ments it is possible to produce very pure sounding notes, instrument, such as the guitar (guitar harmonics), at
called harmonics or ageolets by string players, which which gentle touching of a string will force it into a har-
have an eerie quality, as well as being high in pitch. Har- monic mode when vibrated. String harmonics (ageolet
monics may be used to check at a unison the tuning of tones) are described as having a utelike, silvery quality
strings that are not tuned to the unison. For example, that can be highly eective as a special color <timbre>"
lightly ngering the node found halfway down the highest when used and heard in orchestration.[3] It is unusual to
7.6. REFERENCES 23

encounter natural harmonics higher than the fth partial Harmonic oscillator
on any stringed instrument except the double bass, on ac-
count of its much longer strings.[4] Harmony
Pinch harmonic
7.3.1 Table Pure tone
Pythagorean tuning

Scale of harmonics
Spherical harmonics

Stretched octave
Subharmonic

Tap harmonic

Xenharmonic

Table of harmonics of a stringed instrument with colored dots

indicating which positions can be lightly ngered to generate just 7.6 References
intervals up to the 7th harmonic

[1] Acoustical Society of America - Large grand and small

7.3.2 Articial harmonics
Although harmonics are most often used on open strings,
occasionally a score will call for an articial harmonic,
produced by playing an overtone on a stopped string. As
a performance technique, it is accomplished by using two
ngers on the ngerboard, the rst to shorten the string
to the desired fundamental, with the second touching the
node corresponding to the appropriate harmonic.
upright pianos by Alexander Galembo and Lola L. Cuddly
[2] Hanna Jrvelinen et al. 1999. Audibility of Inhar-
monicity in String Instrument Sounds, and Implications
to Digital Sound Systems
[3] Kennan, Kent and Grantham, Donald (2002/1952). The
Technique of Orchestration, p.69. Sixth Edition. ISBN
0-13-040771-2.
[4] Kennan & Grantham, ibid, p.71.

7.7 External links

7.4 Other information
Harmonics, partials and overtones from fundamen-
Harmonics may be either used or considered as the basis tal frequency
of just intonation systems.
Discussion of Sciarrino's violin etudes and notation
Composer Arnold Dreyblatt is able to bring out dierent
issues
harmonics on the single string of his modied double bass
by slightly altering his unique bowing technique halfway Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Harmonic".
between hitting and bowing the strings. Encyclopdia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge
Composer Lawrence Ball uses harmonics to generate mu- University Press.
sic electronically. Harmonics

Hear and see harmonics on a Piano

7.5 See also
Aristoxenus

Harmonics (electrical power)

Electronic tuner

Formant

Fourier series
Chapter 8

Lateral consonant

A lateral is an l-like consonant in which the airstream A similar process happened during the development of
proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by many other languages, including Brazilian Portuguese,
the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. Old French, and Polish, in all three of these resulting in
Most commonly, the tip of the tongue makes contact with [] or [w], whence Modern French sauce as compared
the upper teeth (see dental consonant) or the upper gum with Spanish salsa, or Polish Wisa (pronounced [viswa])
(the alveolar ridge) just behind the teeth (see alveolar as compared with English Vistula.
consonant). The most common laterals are approximants In central and Venice dialects of Venetian, intervocalic
and belong to the class of liquids, but lateral fricatives and /l/ has turned into a semivocalic [e], so that the written
aricates are common in some parts of the world. word a baa is pronounced [abaea]. The orthography
The labiodental fricatives [f] and [v] often, perhaps usu- uses the letter to represent this phoneme (it specically
ally, have lateral airow, as the lip blocks the airow in represents not the [e] sound but the phoneme that is, in
the center, but they are nonetheless not considered lateral some dialects, [e] and, in others, [l]).
consonants because no language makes a distinction be- Many aboriginal Australian languages have a series of
tween the two possibilities. Plosives are never lateral, but three or four lateral approximants, as do various dialects
they may have lateral release. The distinction is meaning- of Irish. Rarer lateral consonants include the retroex
less for nasals and for consonants articulated in the throat. laterals that can be found in many languages of India
Consonants are not necessarily lateral or central. Some, and in some Swedish dialects, and the voiceless alve-
olar lateral fricative //, found in many Native North
such as Japanese r, are not dened by centrality: Japanese
r varies allophonically between a central ap [] and a American languages, Welsh and Zulu. In Adyghe and
lateral ap []. some Athabaskan languages like Hn, both voiceless and
voiced alveolar lateral fricatives occur, but there is no
approximant. Many of these languages also have lateral
aricates. Some languages have palatal or velar voiceless
8.1 Examples lateral fricatives or aricates, such as Dahalo and Zulu,
but the IPA has no symbols for such sounds. However,
English has one lateral phoneme: the lateral approximant appropriate symbols are easy to make by adding a lateral-
/l/, which in many accents has two allophones. One, fricative belt to the symbol for the corresponding lateral
found before vowels as in lady or y, is called clear l, approximant (see below). Also, a devoicing diacritic may
pronounced as the alveolar lateral approximant [l] with a be added to the approximant.
neutral position of the body of the tongue. The other Nearly all languages with such lateral obstruents also have
variant, so-called dark l found before consonants or word- the approximant. However, there are a number of ex-
nally, as in bold or tell, is pronounced as the velarized ceptions, many of them located in the Pacic Northwest
alveolar lateral approximant [] with the tongue assuming area of the United States. For example, Tlingit has /t,
a spoon-like shape with its back part raised, which gives t, t, , / but no /l/.[1] Other examples from the same
the sound a [w]- or []-like resonance. In some languages, area include Nuu-chah-nulth and Kutenai, and elsewhere,
like Albanian, those two sounds are dierent phonemes. Chukchi and Kabardian.
East Slavic languages contrast [] and [l] but do not have
Standard Tibetan has a voiceless lateral approximant,
[l].
usually romanized as lh, as in the name Lhasa.
In many British accents (e.g. Cockney), dark [] may
A uvular lateral approximant has been reported to occur
undergo vocalization through the reduction and loss of
in some speakers of American English.[2]
contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveolar
ridge, becoming a rounded back vowel or glide. This Pashto has a retroex lateral ap.
process turns tell into something like [t], as must have There are a large number of lateral click consonants; 17
happened with talk [tk] or walk [wk] at some stage.

24
8.2. LIST OF LATERALS
occur in !X.
Lateral trills are also possible, but they do not occur in any
known language. They may be pronounced by initiating
[] or [] with an especially forceful airow. There is no
symbol for them in the IPA. They are sometimes used to
imitate bird calls, and they are a component of Donald
Duck talk.
8.2 List of laterals
8.2.1 Approximants
Dental lateral approximant [l]
Voiced alveolar lateral approximant [l]
Voiceless alveolar lateral approximant [l]
Retroex lateral approximant []
Voiced palatal lateral approximant []
Voiceless palatal lateral approximant []
Velar lateral approximant []
Uvular lateral approximant []
8.2.2 Fricatives
Voiceless dental lateral fricative [] (in Wahgi)
Voiced dental lateral fricative [] (allophonic in
Wahgi)
Voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [] (in Adyghe,
Kabardian, Navajo, Welsh)
Voiced alveolar lateral fricative [] (in Adyghe,
Kabardian, Mongolian, Tigak)
Voiceless retroex lateral fricative [] (or [ ]) (in
Toda)
Voiced retroex lateral fricative [] (in Ao)
Voiceless palatal lateral fricative [] (or [ ]) (in
Dahalo)
Voiceless velar lateral fricative [] (or [ ]) (in Archi,
Nii, Wahgi)
Voiced velar lateral fricative [] (in Archi, allo-
phonic in Wahgi) 8.2.6
Only the alveolar lateral fricatives have dedicated letters
in the IPA. However, others appear in the extIPA.
25
8.2.3 Aricates
Voiceless alveolar lateral aricate [t] (in Navajo,
Tlingit)
Voiced alveolar lateral aricate [d] (allophonically
in Zulu and Xhosa)
Voiceless palatal lateral aricate [c] (or [c ])
(perhaps prepalatal in Sandawe and Hadza)
Voiced palatal lateral aricate [] (perhaps
prepalatal in Sandawe)
Voiceless velar lateral aricate [k] (or [k ]) (in
Archi, Laghuu, Qila Muji)
Voiced velar lateral aricate [] (in Laghuu, Qila
Muji)
8.2.4 Flaps
Alveolar lateral ap [] (in Wayuu)
Voiceless alveolar lateral ap [] (in Wahgi)
Retroex lateral ap [] (or [ ]) (in Pashto, Iwaidja)
Voiceless retroex lateral ap [] (or [ ]) (allophonic
in Wahgi)
Palatal lateral ap [] (in Iwaidja)
Velar lateral ap [] (in Kanite and Melpa)
8.2.5 Ejective
Alveolar lateral ejective fricative [] (in Adyghe,
Kabardian, Tlingit)
Alveolar lateral ejective aricate [t] (in Baslaney,
Navajo, Tlingit)
Palatal lateral ejective aricate [c] (or [c ]) (in
Dahalo, Sandawe , Hadza)
Velar lateral ejective aricate [k] (or [k ]) (in
Archi, Gwi, Zulu)
Clicks
Alveolar lateral clicks [ ], [ ], [ ], etc. (in all ve
Khoisan families and several Bantu languages)
26 CHAPTER 8. LATERAL CONSONANT

8.3 Ambiguous centrality 8.7 References

The IPA requires sounds to be dened as to centrality,
as either central or lateral. However, languages may be
ambiguous. For example, Japanese /r/ varies among []
(especially before /i/), [] (a.k.a. [], especially before /a/)
and [] (especially before /o/). Transcribing it as either a
central ap or a lateral ap is therefore misleading. It is
sometimes transcribed with an l ligature, l.[3]
Gimson, Alfred Charles (2014), Cruttenden, Alan,
ed., Gimsons Pronunciation of English (8th ed.),
Routledge, ISBN 9781444183092
Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The
Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.

8.4 Lateralized consonants

A superscript is dened as lateral release.
Consonants may also be pronounced with simultaneous
lateral and central airow. This is well-known from
speech pathology with a lateral lisp. However, it also oc-
curs in nondisordered speech in some southern Arabic
dialects and possibly some Modern South Arabian lan-
guages, which have pharyngealized nonsibilant // and
// (simultaneous [] and []) and possibly a sibilant
// (simultaneous [s]). Examples are /aim/ 'pain' in
the dialect of Al-Rubu'ah and /ahr/ 'back' and /ab/
'hyena' in Rijal Alma'.[4] [5] (Here the indicates simul-
taneous laterality rather than lateral release.) Old Arabic
has been analyzed as having the emphatic centrallateral
fricatives [], [] and [].[6]

8.5 Notes
[1] Some older Tlingit speakers have [l], as an allophone of
/n/. This can also be analyzed as phonemic /l/ with an
allophone [n].

[2] Gimson (2014:221)

[3] E.g. in Dogolpolsky (2013) Indo-European Dictionary

with Nostratic Etymologies

[4] Heselwood (2013) Phonetic transcription in theory and

practice, p 122123

[5] Janet Watson. Lateral fricatives and lateral emphatics in

southern Saudi Arabia and Mehri. academia.edu.

[6] Potet (2013) Arabic and Persian Loanwords in Tagalog,

p. 89 .

8.6 See also

Delateralization

Lateral release (phonetics)

List of phonetics topics

Chapter 9

Nasal consonant

This article is about nasal stop consonants. For nasal Examples of languages containing nasal occlusives:
fricative consonants, see true nasal fricatives. The voiced retroex nasal is [] is a common sound in
Languages of India.
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive, nasal The voiced palatal nasal [] is a common sound in
stop in contrast with a nasal fricative, or nasal continu- European languages, such as: Spanish , French and
ant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered Italian gn, Catalan and Hungarian ny, Czech and
velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Ex- Slovak , Polish , Occitan and Portuguese nh,
amples of nasals in English are [n] and [m], in words such Serbo-Croatian nj, and (before a vowel) Modern Greek
as nose and mouth. Nasal occlusives are nearly universal .
in human languages. There are also other kinds of nasal
consonants in some languages. Many Germanic languages, including German, Dutch,
English and Swedish, as well as varieties of Chinese such
as Mandarin and Cantonese, have [m], [n] and []. Tamil
has a six-fold distinction between [m], [n], [n], [], []
9.1 Denition and [] (,,,,,).

Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, in which
air escapes through the nose but not through the mouth,
as it is blocked (occluded) by the lips or tongue. The
oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound.
Rarely, non-occlusive consonants may be nasalized.
Catalan, Occitan, Spanish, and Italian have [m], [n], []
as phonemes, and [] and [] as allophones. Neverthe-
less, in several American dialects of Spanish, there is no
palatal nasal but only a palatalized nasal, [n], as in En-
glish canyon.

Most nasals are voiced, and in fact, the nasal sounds In Brazilian Portuguese and Angolan Portuguese [],
[n] and [m] are among the most common sounds cross- written nh, is typically pronounced as [], a nasal palatal
linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few languages approximant, a nasal glide (in Polish, this feature is also
such as Burmese, Welsh, Icelandic and Guaran. (Com- possible as an allophone). Semivowels in Portuguese of-
pare oral stops, which block o the air completely, and ten nasalize before and always after nasal vowels, result-
fricatives, which obstruct the air with a narrow channel. ing in [] and [w]. What would be coda nasal occlusives in
Both stops and fricatives are more commonly voiceless other West Iberian languages is only slightly pronounced
than voiced, and are known as obstruents.) before dental consonants. Outside this environment the
nasality is spread over the vowel or become a nasal diph-
In terms of acoustics, nasals are sonorants, which means thong (mambembe [m bjbi], outside the nal, only in
that they do not signicantly restrict the escape of air (as Brazil, and mantm [m tj ~ m t j] in all Portuguese
it can freely escape out the nose). However, nasals are dialects).
also obstruents in their articulation because the ow of
air through the mouth is blocked. This duality, a sono- The term 'nasal occlusive' (or 'nasal stop') is generally
rant airow through the nose along with an obstruction in abbreviated to nasal. However, there are also nasalized
the mouth, means that nasal occlusives behave both like fricatives, nasalized aps, nasal glides, and nasal vowels,
sonorants and like obstruents. For example, nasals tend as in French, Portuguese, and Polish. In the IPA, nasal
to pattern with other sonorants such as [r] and [l], but in vowels and nasalized consonants are indicated by placing
many languages, they may develop from or into stops. a tilde (~) over the vowel or consonant in question: French
sang [s ], Portuguese bom [b].
Acoustically, nasals have bands of energy at around 200
and 2,000 Hz.
1. ^ The symbol n is commonly used to represent the
dental nasal as well, rather than n, as it is rarely distin-
guished from the alveolar nasal.

27
28 CHAPTER 9. NASAL CONSONANT

9.2 Voiceless nasals to assume that nasalization in occlusives is allophonic.

There is then a second step in claiming that nasal vow-
A few languages have phonemic voiceless nasal occlu- els nasalize oral occlusives, rather than oral vowels de-
sives. Among them are Icelandic, Faroese, Burmese, nasalizing nasal occlusives, that is, whether [m, mba]
Jalapa Mazatec, Kildin Sami, Welsh, and Central are phonemically /mb, mba/ without full nasals, or /m,
Alaskan Yup'ik. Iaai of New Caledonia has an unusu- ma/ without prenasalized stops. Postulating underlying
ally large number of them, with /m m n /, along oral or prenasalized stops rather than true nasals helps to
with a number of voiceless approximants. explain the apparent instability of nasal correspondences
throughout NigerCongo compared with, for example,
Indo-European.[3]
9.3 Other kinds of nasal consonant This analysis comes at the expense, in some languages, of
postulating either a single nasal consonant that can only
Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) distinguish purely be syllabic, or a larger set of nasal vowels than oral vowels,
nasal consonants, the nasal occlusives such as m n ng in both typologically odd situations. The way such a situa-
which the airow is purely nasal, from partial nasal con- tion could develop is illustrated by a Jukunoid language,
sonants such as prenasalized consonants and nasal pre- Wukari. Wukari allows oral vowels in syllables like ba,
stopped consonants, which are nasal for only part of their mba and nasal vowels in b, m, suggesting that nasals
duration, as well as from nasalized consonants, which become prenasalized stops before oral vowels. Histori-
have simultaneous oral and nasal airow.[1] In some lan- cally, however, *mb became **mm before nasal vowels,
guages, such as Portuguese, a nasal consonant may have and then reduced to *m, leaving the current asymmetric
occlusive and non-occlusive allophones. In general, there- distribution.[4]
fore, a nasal consonant may be: In older speakers of the Tlingit language, [l] and [n] are
allophones. Tlingit is usually described as having an un-
a nasal occlusive, such as English m, n, ng usual, perhaps unique lack of /l/ despite having ve lateral
obstruents; the older generation could be argued to have
a nasal approximant, as in Brazilian Portuguese nh /l/ but at the expense of having no nasals.

a nasal ap, such as the nasal retroex lateral ap in

Pashto
prenasalized consonants, pre-stopped nasals and
post-stopped nasals
nasal clicks such as Zulu nq, nx, nc
other nasalized consonants, such as nasalized frica-
tives
9.4 Languages without nasals
A few languages, perhaps 2%,[2] contain no phonemically
distinctive nasals. This led Ferguson (1963) to assume
that all languages have at least one primary nasal occlu-
sive. However, there are exceptions.
9.5 Lack of phonemic nasals
When a language is claimed to lack nasals altogether, as is similar.
with several NigerCongo languages[note 1] or the Pirah
language of the Amazon, nasal and non-nasal or prenasal-
ized consonants usually alternate allophonically, and it
is a theoretical claim on the part of the individual lin-
guist that the nasal is not the basic form of the consonant.
In the case of some NigerCongo languages, for exam-
ple, nasals occur before only nasal vowels. Since nasal
vowels are phonemic, it simplies the picture somewhat
9.6 Lack of phonetic nasals
Several of languages surrounding Puget Sound, such
as Quileute (Chimakuan family), Lushootseed (Salishan
family), and Makah (Wakashan family), are truly without
any nasalization whatsoever, in consonants or vowels, ex-
cept in special speech registers such as baby talk or the
archaic speech of mythological gures (and perhaps not
even that in the case of Quileute). This is an areal fea-
ture, only a few hundred years old, where nasals became
voiced stops ([m] became [b], etc.) after colonial contact.
For example, Snohomish is currently pronounced sdoho-
bish, but was transcribed with nasals in the rst English-
language records.
The only other places in the world where this is known
to occur is in New Guinea. In the central dialect of the
Rotokas language of Bougainville Island, nasals are only
used when imitating foreign accents. (A second dialect
has a series of nasals.) The Foau language of West Irian
The unconditioned loss of nasals, as in Puget Sound, is
unusual. However, currently in Korean, word-initial /m/
and /n/ are shifting to [b] and [d]. This started out in
nonstandard dialects and was restricted to the beginning
of prosodic units (a common position for fortition), but
has expanded to many speakers of the standard language
to the beginnings of common words even within prosodic
units.[5]
9.10. BIBLIOGRAPHY 29

9.7 See also 9.10 Bibliography

Oral consonant Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The
Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
Nasal click well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.

Nasal vowel Ferguson (1963) 'Assumptions about nasals, in

Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Language, pp 5060.
Nasalization Saout, J. le (1973) 'Languages sans consonnes
nasales, Annales de l Universit d'Abidjan, H, 6, 1,
List of phonetics topics
179205.
Syllabic consonant Williamson, Kay (1989) 'NigerCongo overview', in
Bendor-Samuel & Hartell (eds.) The NigerCongo
Languages, 345.
9.8 Notes
[1] These languages lie in a band from western Liberia to
southeastern Nigeria, and north to southern Burkina.
They include:

Liberia: Kpelle (Mande); Grebo, Klao (Kru)

Burkina Faso: Bwamu (Gur)
Ivory Coast: Dan, Guro-Yaoure, Wan-Mwan,
Gban/Gagu, Tura (Mande); Senadi/Senufo (Gur);
Nyabwa, W (Kru); Ebri, Avikam, Abure (Kwa)
Ghana: Abron, Akan, Ewe (Kwa)
Benin: Gen, Fon (Kwa)
Nigeria: Mbaise Igbo, Ikwere (Igboid)
CAR: Yakoma (Ubangi)

(Heine & Nurse, eds, 2008, A Linguistic Geography of

Africa, p.46)

9.9 References
[1] Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of
the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 102. ISBN
0-631-19814-8.

[2] Maddieson, Ian. 2008. Absence of Common Conso-

nants. In: Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew S. &
Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) The World Atlas
of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck
Digital Library, chapter 18. Available online at http:
//wals.info/feature/18. Accessed on 2008-09-15.

[3] As noted by Kay Williamson (1989:24).

[4] Larry Hyman, 1975. Nasal states and nasal processes.

In Nasalfest: Papers from a Symposium on Nasals and
Nasalization, pp. 249264

[5] Yoshida, Kenji, 2008. Phonetic implementation of Ko-

rean 'denasalization' and its variation related to prosody.
IULC Working Papers, vol. 8.
Chapter 10

Nasalization

In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the pro- vowels. Some South Arabian languages use phonemic
duction of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that nasalized fricatives, such as /z/, which sounds something
some air escapes through the nose during the production like a simultaneous [n] and [z]. The Chinese consonant
of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is ([]) has an odd history; for example, it has evolved
[n]. into [] and [] (or [] and [] respectively, depend-
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasalization is in- ing on accents) in Standard Chinese; [z]/[] and [n] in
Hokkien; [z]/[] and [n]/[] while borrowed into Japan.
dicated by printing a tilde diacritic U+0303 COMBIN-
ING TILDE (HTML &#771;) above the symbol for the It seems likely that it was once a nasalized fricative, per-
haps a palatal [].
sound to be nasalized: [] is the nasalized equivalent of
[a], and [] is the nasalized equivalent of [v]. An older In Coatzospan Mixtec, fricatives and aricates are nasal-
IPA subscript diacritic [], called an ogonek, is still seen, ized before nasal vowels even when they are voiceless.
especially when the vowel bears tone marks that would In the Hupa, the velar nasal // often has the tongue not
interfere with the superscript tilde. For example, [ make full contact, resulting in a nasalized approximant,
] are more legible in most fonts than [ ]. []. That is cognate with a nasalized palatal approximant
[] in other Athabaskan languages.
In Umbundu, phonemic // contrasts with the
10.1 Nasal vowels (allophonically) nasalized approximant [w ] and so
is likely to be a true fricative rather than an approximant.
Main article: Nasal vowel In Old and Middle Irish, the lenited m was a nasalized
bilabial fricative.[2]
Nasal vowels are found in various languages around Sundanese has an allophonic nasalized glottal stop [];
the world, such as French, Portuguese, Breton, Hindi, nasalized stops can occur only with pharyngeal articula-
Hmong, Hokkien, Yoruba and Cherokee. Those nasal tion or lower, or they would be simple nasals.[3] Nasal
vowels contrast with oral vowels. Many languages, how- aps are common allophonically. Many West African
ever, have only oral vowels or do not contrast oral and languages have a nasal ap [] (or [n ]) as an allophone of
nasal vowels. // before a nasal vowel; Pashto, however, has a phonemic
nasal retroex lateral ap.
There are occasional cases for vowels showing contrasting
degrees of nasality.. One such is Palantla Chinantec.[1] Other languages, such as the Khoisan languages of
Khoekhoe and Gui, as well as several of the !Kung lan-
guages, include nasal click consonants. Nasalization of
10.2 Nasal consonants the phonemes is denoted with a superscript preced-
ing the consonant (for example, ).[4] Nasalized later-
als such as [l] are easy to produce but rare or nonexistent
By far the most common nasal sounds are nasal conso-
as phonemes; often when [l] is nasalized, it becomes [n].
nants such as [m], [n] or []. Most nasal consonants are
occlusives, and airow through the mouth is blocked and
redirected through the nose. Their oral counterparts are
the stops. 10.4 True nasal (nareal) fricatives
Besides nasalized oral fricatives, there are true nasal frica-
10.3 Nasalized consonants tives, previously called nareal fricatives, that are some-
times produced by people with disordered speech. The
Nasalized versions of other consonant sounds also exist turbulence in the airow characteristic of fricatives is pro-
but are much rarer than either nasal occlusives or nasal duced not in the mouth but in the nasal cavity. A tilde and

30
10.8. REFERENCES 31

trema diacritic (two dots representing the nostrils) is used
for this in the extensions to the IPA: [n ] is a voiced alve-
olar nasal fricative, with no airow out of the mouth, and
[n ] is the voiceless equivalent; [v] is an oral fricative with
simultaneous nasal frication. No known language makes
use of nasal fricatives in non-disordered speech.
[3] Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of
the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 134. ISBN
0-631-19814-8.
[4] Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of
the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 268. ISBN
0-631-19814-8.

[5] The World Atlas of Language Structures Online Chapter

10 Vowel Nasalization
10.5 Denasalization
Main article: Denasalization

Nasalization may be lost over time. There are also denasal

sounds, which sound like nasals spoken with a head cold.
They may be found in non-pathological speech as a lan-
guage loses nasal consonants, as in Korean.

10.6 Contextual nasalization

Vowels assimilate to surrounding nasal consonants in
many languages, such as Thai, creating nasal vowel al-
lophones. Some languages exhibit a nasalization of
segments adjacent to phonemic or allophonic nasal vow-
els, such as Apurin.
Contextual nasalization can lead to the addition of nasal
vowel phonemes to a language.[5] That happened in
French, where most nal consonants disappeared, but in
the case of nal nasals, the preceding vowels became
nasal and introduced a new distinction into the language.
An example is vin blanc [v bl ] ('white wine'), ultimately
from Latin vinum and blancum.

10.7 See also

Nasal consonant

Prenasalized consonant

Nasal release

Nasality

Eclipsis, a similar process in Gaelic that is often

called nasalization

10.8 References
[1] Juliette Blevins (2004). Evolutionary Phonology: The
Emergence of Sound Patterns. Cambridge University
Press. p. 203.

[2] Thurneysen, Rudolf; D. A. Binchy (1946). A Grammar of

Old Irish. Translated by Osborn Bergin. Dublin: Dublin
Institute for Advanced Studies. p. 85. ISBN 1-85500-
161-6.
Chapter 11

Overtone singing

Overtone singingalso known as overtone chanting,
harmonic singing or throat singingis a type of
singing in which the singer manipulates the resonances
(or formants) created as air travels from the lungs, past
the vocal folds, and out of the lips to produce a melody.
The harmonics (fundamental and overtones) of a sound
wave made by the human voice can be selectively am-
plied by changing the shape of the resonant cavities of
the mouth, larynx and pharynx.[1] This resonant tuning
allows singers to create apparently more than one pitch at
the same time (the fundamental and a selected overtone),
while actually generating only a single fundamental fre-
quency with their vocal folds.
11.1 Asia
11.1.1 Mongolia and Buryatia
Mongolians also sing many other styles such as karkhi-
raa (literally growling) and isgeree.
Many of these styles are also practiced around neighbor-
ing regions such as Tuva and Altai.
11.1.2 Tuva
Main article: Tuvan throat singing
Tuvan overtone singing is practiced by the Tuva people
of southern Siberia, Russia. The history of Tuvan over-
tone singing reaches very far back . There is a wide
range of vocalizations, including Sygyt, Kargyraa (which
also uses a second sound source), Khoomei, Chylandyk,
Dumchuktaar, and Ezengileer. Most of these styles are
closely related to the styles and variations in neighboring
Mongolia.

Main article: Music of Mongolia Throat singing 11.1.3 Altai and Khakassia

It is thought that the art of overtone singing originated
from south western Mongolia in todays Khovd Province
and Govi Altai region. Nowadays, overtone singing is
found throughout the country and Mongolia is often con-
sidered the most active place of overtone singing in the
world.[2] The most commonly practiced style, Khmii
(written in Cyrillic as ), can be divided up into which are similar to Tuvan. They also have their own
the following categories:
uruulyn / labial khmii
Tuvas neighbouring Russian regions, the Altai Republic
to the west, and Khakassia to the northwest, have devel-
oped forms of throat singing called kai, or khai. In
Altai, this is used mostly for epic poetry performance,
to the accompaniment of topshur. Altai narrators ("kai-
chi") perform in kargyraa, khmei and sygyt styles,
style, a very high harmonics, emerging from kargyraa.
Variations of kai are called karkyra, sybysky, homei and
sygyt. The rst well-known kai-chi was Kalkin.

tagnain / palatal khmii 11.1.4 Chukchi Peninsula

khamryn / nasal khmii The Chukchi people of Chukchi Peninsula in the ex-
treme northeast of Russia also practice a form of throat
bagalzuuryn, khooloin / glottal, throat khmii singing.[3]

tseejiin khondiin, khevliin / chest cavity, stomach

khmii 11.1.5 Tibet
turlegt or khosmoljin khmii / khmii combined Tibetan Buddhist chanting is a subgenre of throat singing,
with long song mainly practiced by monks of Tibet, including Qinghai

32
11.3. NORTH AMERICA 33

(Khokhonor) province Tibetan plateau area, Tibetan 11.2.2 Northern Europe

monks of Nepal, Bhutan, India and various locations in
the Himalayan region. Most often the chants hold to The Sami people of the northern parts of Sweden,
the lower pitches possible in throat singing. Various cer- Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia, have
emonies and prayers call for throat singing in Tibetan a singing genre called yoik. While overtone techniques
Buddhism, often with more than one monk chanting are not a dening feature of yoik, individuals sometimes
at a time. There are dierent Tibetan throat singing utilize overtones in the production of yoik.
styles, such as Gyuke (Tibetan: , Wylie: rgyud
skad) - style with the lowest pitch of voice; Dzoke (Ti-
betan: , Wylie: mdzod skad) and Gyer (Ti- 11.2.3 Bashkortostan
betan: , Wylie: gyer).
The Bashkirs of Bashkortostan, Russia have a style of
overtone singing called zl (sometimes spelled uzlyau;
11.1.6 Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan Bashkort ), which nearly died out. In addition,
Bashkorts also sing uzlyau while playing the kurai, a na-
The oral poetry of Kazakhstan and the Uzbek region tional instrument. This technique of vocalizing into a
of Karakalpakstan sometimes enters the realm of throat ute can also be found in folk music as far west as the
singing. Balkans and Hungary.

11.1.7 Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan

11.3 North America
Balochi Nur Sur is one of the ancient forms of overtone
singing and is still popular in parts of Pakistan, Iran and 11.3.1 Inuit
Afghanistan especially in the Sulaiman Mountains.
The resurgence of a once-dying Inuit tradition called
katajjaq is currently under way in Canada. Inuit throat
11.1.8 Hokkaido singing was a form of entertainment among Inuit women
while the men were away on hunting trips. It was an ac-
The Ainu of Hokkaid (Japan) once practiced a type of tivity that was primarily done by Inuit women, though
throat singing called rekuhkara, which is now extinct. men also did it. In the Inuit language Inuktitut, throat
The last singer of rekuhkara died in 1976, but there are singing is called katajjaq, pirkusirtuk or nipaquhiit de-
some recordings left.[3] pending on the Canadian Arctic region. It was regarded
more as a type of vocal or breathing game in the Inuit
culture rather than a form of music. Inuit throat singing
11.2 Europe is generally done by two individuals but can involve four
or more people together as well. In Inuit throat singing,
11.2.1 Sardinia two Inuit women would face each other either standing or
crouching down while holding each others arms. One
Main article: Cantu a tenore would lead with short deep rhythmic sounds while the
other would respond. The leader would repeat sounds
with short gaps in between. The follower would ll in
On the island of Sardinia (Italy), especially in the subre- these gaps with her own rhythmic sounds. Sometimes
gion of Barbagia, one of the two dierent styles of poly- both Inuit women would be doing a dance like movement
phonic singing is marked by the use of a throaty voice. like rocking from left to right while throat singing. The
This kind of song is called a tenore. The other style, practice is compared more to a game or competition than
known as cuncordu, does not use throat singing. A tenore to a musical style. In the game, Inuit women sit or stand
is practiced by groups of four male singers each of whom face-to-face and create rhythmic patterns.
has a distinct role; the 'oche or boche (pronounced /oke/
or /boke/, voice) is the solo voice, while the mesu
'oche or mesu boche (half voice), contra (against)
and bassu (bass) listed in descending pitch order
11.4 Africa
form a chorus (another meaning of tenore). Boche and
mesu boche sing in a regular voice, whereas contra and 11.4.1 South Africa
bassu sing with a technique aecting the larynx. In 2005,
Unesco classed the cantu a tenore among intangible world Some Thembu Xhosa women of South Africa have a
heritage.[4] Among the most well known groups who per- low, rhythmic style of throat-singing, similar to the Tuvan
form a tenore are Tenores di Bitti, Tenores de Orosei, Kargyraa style, that is called unngqokolo. It is often ac-
Tenores di Oniferi and Tenores di Neoneli. companied by call-and-response vocals and complicated
34
poly-rhythms.[5][6][7]
11.5 Non-traditional styles
11.5.1 Canada, United States and Europe
The 1920s Texan singer of cowboy songs, Arthur Miles,
independently created a style of overtone singing, sim-
ilar to sygyt, as a supplement to the normal yodelling
of country western music. Blind Willie Johnson, also
of Texas, is not a true overtone singer, according to the
National Geographic, but his ability to shift from guttural
grunting noises to a soft lullaby is suggestive of the tonal
timbres of overtone singing.[8]
Starting in the 1960s, some musicians in the West ei-
ther have collaborated with traditional throat singers or
ventured into the realm of throat singing and overtone
singing, or both. Some made original musical contri-
butions and helped this art rediscover its transcultural
universality. As harmonics are universal to all physical
sounds, the notion of authenticity is best understood in
terms of musical quality. Musicians of note in this genre
include Collegium Vocale Kln (who rst began using
this technique in 1968), Michael Vetter, David Hykes,[9]
Jill Purce, Jim Cole, Ry Cooder, Paul Pena (mixing the
traditional Tuvan style with that of American Blues),
Steve Sklar and Kiva (specializing in jazz/ world beat gen-
res and composing for overtone choirs). Composer Baird
Hersey and his group Prana with Krishna Das (overtone
singing and Hindu mantra), Canadian songwriter Nathan
Rogers has become an adept throat singer and teaches
Tuvan throat singing in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Paul Pena was featured in the documentary Genghis
Blues, which tells the story of his pilgrimage to Tuva to
compete in their annual throat singing competition. The
lm won the documentary award at the 1999 Sundance
Film Festival, and was nominated for an Oscar in 2000.
Tuvan singer Sainkho Namtchylak has collaborated with
free jazz musicians such as Evan Parker and Ned Rothen-
berg. Lester Bowie and Ornette Coleman worked with
the Tenores di Bitti, and Eleanor Hovda has written a
piece using the Xhosa style of singing. DJs and perform-
ers of electronic music like The KLF have also merged
their music with throat singing, overtone singing, or with
the theory of harmonics behind it.
A capella singer Avi Kaplan also exhibited overtone
singing during his groups (Pentatonix) performances. He
merged throat singing together with dubstep a capella.
The Overtone Choir Spektrum from Prague, Czech Re-
public, is unique among overtone choirs, particularly be-
cause it connects traditional choir singing with overtone
techniques. It is the only one of its kind in the Czech
Republic, and one of only a few in the world.
Several contemporary classical composers have incorpo-
CHAPTER 11. OVERTONE SINGING
rated overtone singing into their works. Karlheinz Stock-
hausen was one of the rst, with Stimmung in 1968. Past
Life Melodies for SATB chorus by Australian composer
Sarah Hopkins (b. 1958) also calls for this technique. In
Water Passion after St. Matthew by Tan Dun, the soprano
and bass soloists sing in a variety of techniques including
overtone singing of the Mongolian style.
Overtone singing can be heard in the humwhistle. A
humwhistle, or otherwise known as whistle-hum, cre-
ates a high pitch and low pitch simultaneously. The two-
tone sound is related to eld holler, overtone singing, and
yodeling.
11.5.2 India
Ethnomusicologist John Levy recorded a Rajasthani
singer who used overtones to imitate a jaw harp and a
double-ute. There is no tradition of this style of singing
there.
11.6 See also
Human voice
List of overtone musicians
11.7 Notes
[1] Titze 2008; Titze 1994; Pariser & Zimmerman 2004
[2] Sklar, 2005
[3] 4.3.02. Inuit Throat-Singing. Mustrad.org.uk. Re-
trieved 2008-11-27.
[4] Bandinu 2006.
[5] Dr. Dave Dargie Some recent developments in Xhosa
music : activities of the Ngqoko Traditional Xhoa Music
Ensemble, and at the University of Fort Hare. Retrieved
on 2014-04-23.
[6] Dr. Dave Dargie UMNGQOKOLO - Thembu Xhosa
- OVERTONE SINGING lmed 1985-1998 in South
Africa. Retrieved on 2014-04-23.
[7] Dargie, Dave. Xhosa Overtone Singing The world of
South African music: A reader. Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2005. 152-155 Google Books Web. 23 Apr. 2014.
[8] Miller, Bruce. Overtone Singing Music. National Geo-
graphic. Retrieved February 20, 2012.
[9] Bellamy and MacLean 2005, 515.
11.9. EXTERNAL LINKS 35

11.8 References Audio samples of overtone and throat singing

Online overtone singing generator

Bandinu, Omar (2006). "Il canto a tenore: dai
nuraghi all'Unesco", Siti 2, no.3 (JulySeptember): Ken-Ichi Sakakibara Overtone singing research.
1621.
Harmonic singing vs. normal singing acoustical
Bellamy, Isabel, and Donald MacLean (2005). Ra- measurements and explanation
diant Healing: The Many Paths to Personal Har-
mony and Planetary Wholeness. Buddina, Queens- Scientic American: The Throat Singers of Tuva
land (Australia): Joshua Books. ISBN 0-9756878-
Types of Throat Singing with Tips /Tuvan Throat-
5-9
Singing by Steve Sklar
Haouli, Janete El (2006). Demetrio Stratos: en
Observation of the Laryngeal Movements for Throat
busca de la voz-msica. Mxico, D. F.: Radio
Singing: Vibration of two pairs of folds in human
EducacinConsejo Nacional para la Cultura y las
larynx
Artes.
Levin, Theodore C., and Michael E. Edgerton Audio samples of throat singing
(1999). "The Throat Singers of Tuva". Scientic www.overtonesinging.com Overtone Singing with
American 281, no. 3 (September): 8087. Rollin Rachele
Levin, Theodore, and Valentina Szkei (2006). Tuva throat singers on Flickr
Where Rivers and Mountains Sing. Bloomington: In-
diana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34715-7. Kivas audio samples and information on overtone
singing
Pariser, David, and Enid Zimmerman (2004).
Learning in the Visual Arts: Characteristics of Read in Serbian on muzickacentrala.com
Gifted and Talented Individuals, in Handbook of
Research and Policy in Art Education, Elliot W. Eis- Chukchi throat singing (Zoa Tagrin'a, Olga
ner and Michael D. Day (editors). Lawrence Erl- Letyka)
baum Associates. p. 388. ISBN 978-0-8058-4972- Overtone singing music
1.
- articles, video clips on overtone singing in Tuva,
Saus, Wolfgang (2004). Oberton Singen. Schnau Mongolia, South Africa, Tibet
im Odenwald: Traumzeit-Verlag. ISBN 3-933825-
36-9 (German).
Sklar, Steve (2005). Types of throat singing ""
Titze, Ingo R. (1994). Principles of Voice Produc-
tion. Englewood Clis, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN
978-0-13-717893-3 Reprinted Iowa City: National
Center for Voice and Speech, 2000. (NCVS.org)
ISBN 978-0-87414-122-1 .
Titze, Ingo R. (2008). The Human Instrument.
Scientic American 298, no. 1 (July):94101. PM
18225701
Tongeren, Mark C. van (2002). Overtone Singing:
Physics and Metaphysics of Harmonics in East and
West. Amsterdam: Fusica. ISBN 90-807163-2-4
(pbk), ISBN 90-807163-1-6 (cloth).

11.9 External links

Overtone singing used in choir music - Overtone
Choir Spektrum & Jan Stanek
Overtone singing in a water tower - Jim Cole &
Spectral Voices
Chapter 12

Sibilant

Sibilance is a manner of articulation of fricative and 12.1 Acoustics

aricate consonants, made by directing a stream of air
with the tongue towards the sharp edge of the teeth, which Sibilants are louder than their non-sibilant counterparts,
are held close together; a consonant that uses sibilance and most of their acoustic energy occurs at higher fre-
may be called a sibilant, or a strident. Examples of sibi- quencies than non-sibilant fricatives. [s] has the most
lants are the consonants at the beginning of the English acoustic strength at around 8,000 Hz, but can reach as
words sip, zip, ship, chip, and jump, and the second con- high as 10,000 Hz. [] has the bulk of its acoustic energy
sonant in vision. The symbols in the International Pho- at around 4,000 Hz, but can extend up to around 8,000
netic Alphabet used to denote the sibilant sounds in these Hz.
words are, respectively, [s] [z] [] [t] [d] []. More
specically, the sounds [t] [d], as in chip and jump,
are aricates, whereas the rest are fricatives. Sibilants
have a characteristically intense sound, which accounts
12.2 Sibilant types
for their paralinguistic use in getting ones attention (e.g.
calling someone using psst!" or quieting someone using All sibilants are coronal consonants (made with the tip or
shhhh!"). front part of the tongue). However, there is a great deal
of variety among sibilants as to tongue shape, point of
In the alveolar hissing sibilants [s] and [z], the back of contact on the tongue, and point of contact on the upper
the tongue forms a narrow channel (is grooved) to focus side of the mouth.
the stream of air more intensely, resulting in a high pitch.
With the hushing sibilants (occasionally termed shibi- The following variables aect sibilant sound quality,
lants), such as English [], [t], [], and [d], the tongue and, along with their possible values, are ordered from
is atter, and the resulting pitch lower. sharpest (highest-pitched) to dullest (lowest-pitched):
Because all sibilants are also stridents, the terms are
Tongue shape: grooved, alveolo-palatal, palato-
sometimes used interchangeably. However, the terms do
alveolar, retroex
not mean the same thing. The English stridents are /f, v,
s, z, , , t, d/. The English sibilants are a more high Place of articulation (point of contact on the up-
pitched subset of the stridents. The English sibilants are per side of the mouth): dental or denti-alveolar,
/s, z, , , t, d/. /f/ and /v/ are stridents, but not sibilants, alveolar, postalveolar, palatal
because they are lower in pitch.
Point of contact on the tongue: laminal closed (see
Stridency refers to the perceptual intensity of the sound
below), laminal non-"closed, apical, subapical
of a sibilant consonant, or obstacle fricatives or af-
fricates, which refers to the critical role of the teeth in
producing the sound as an obstacle to the airstream. Non- Generally, the values of the dierent variables co-occur
sibilant fricatives and aricates produce their characteris- so as to produce an overall sharper or duller sound. For
tic sound directly with the tongue or lips etc. and the place example, a laminal denti-alveolar grooved sibilant occurs
of contact in the mouth, without secondary involvement in Polish, and a subapical palatal retroex sibilant occurs
of the teeth. in Toda.

The characteristic intensity of sibilants means that small

variations in tongue shape and position are perceivable, 12.2.1 Tongue shape
with the result that there are a large number of sibilant
types that contrast in various languages. The main distinction is the shape of the tongue. Most
sibilants have a groove running down the centerline of the
tongue that helps focus the airstream, but its not known
how widespread this is. In addition, the following tongue

36
12.2. SIBILANT TYPES
shapes are described, from sharpest and highest-pitched Speaking non-technically, the retroex consonant []
to dullest and lowest-pitched:
Hollow (e.g. [s z]): This hollow accepts a large vol-
ume of air that is forced through a typically narrow
aperture that directs a high-velocity jet of air against
the teeth, which results in a high-pitched, pierc-
ing hissing sound. Because of the prominence of
these sounds, they are the most common and most
stable of sibilants cross-linguistically. They occur in 12.2.2 Place of articulation
English, where they are denoted with a letter s or z,
as in soon or zone.
Alveolo-palatal (e.g. [ ]): with a convex, V-
shaped tongue, and highly palatalized (middle of the
tongue strongly raised or bowed).
Palato-alveolar (e.g. [ ]): with a domed tongue
(convex and moderately palatalized). These sounds
occur in English, where they are denoted with letter
combinations such as sh, ch, g, j or si, as in shin, 12.2.3
chin, gin and vision.
Retroex (e.g. [ ]): with a at or concave tongue,
and no palatalization. These sounds occur in a large
number of varieties, some of which also go by other
names (e.g. at postalveolar or "apico-alveolar").
The subapical palatal or true retroex sounds are
the very dullest and lowest-pitched of all the sibi-
lants.
The latter three post-alveolar types of sounds are often
known as hushing sounds because of their quality, as
opposed to the hissing alveolar sounds. The alveolar
sounds in fact occur in several varieties, in addition to the
normal sound of English s:
Palatalized: Sibilants can occur with or without rais-
ing the tongue body to the palate (palatalization).
Palatalized alveolars are transcribed e.g. [s] and oc-
cur in Russian; they sound similar to the cluster [sj]
occurring in the middle of the English phrase miss
you.
Lisping: Alveolar sibilants made with the tip of the
tongue (apical) near the upper teeth have a softer
sound reminiscent of (but still sharper-sounding
than) the lisping [] sound of English think. These
sounds are relatively uncommon, but occur in some
of the indigenous languages of California[1] as well
as in the Spanish dialects of eastern Andalusia
(southeast Spain), in cities such as Granada, Huelva,
Cordoba, Jan and Almeria. In these dialects, the
lisping sibilant [s] (sometimes indicated in Spanish
dialectology as s) is the normal pronunciation of
the letters s and z, as well as c before i or e, replacing
the [s] or [] that occurs elsewhere in Andalucia.[2]
37
sounds somewhat like a mixture between the regular En-
glish [] of ship and a strong American r"; while
the alveolo-palatal consonant [] sounds somewhat like a
mixture of English [] of ship and the [sj] in the middle
of miss you.
Sibilants can be made at any coronal articulation, i.e.
the tongue can contact the upper side of the mouth any-
where from the upper teeth (dental) to the hard palate
(palatal), with the in-between articulations being denti-
alveolar, alveolar and postalveolar.
Point of contact on the tongue
The tongue can contact the upper side of the mouth with
the very tip of the tongue (an apical articulation, e.g. []);
with the surface just behind the tip, called the blade of the
tongue (a laminal articulation, e.g. []); or with the under-
side of the tip (a subapical articulation). Apical and sub-
apical articulations are always tongue-up, with the tip of
the tongue above the teeth, while laminal articulations can
be either tongue-up or tongue-down, with the tip of the
tongue behind the lower teeth. This distinction is partic-
ularly important for retroex sibilants, because all three
varieties can occur, with noticeably dierent sound qual-
ities. For more information on these variants and their
relation to sibilants, see the article on postalveolar conso-
nants.
For tongue-down laminal articulations, an additional dis-
tinction can be made depending on where exactly behind
the lower teeth the tongue tip is placed. A little ways
back from the lower teeth is a hollow area (or pit) in the
lower surface of the mouth. When the tongue tip rests
in this hollow area, there is an empty space below the
tongue (a sublingual cavity), which results in a relatively
duller sound. When the tip of the tongue rests against
the lower teeth, there is no sublingual cavity, resulting in
a sharper sound. Usually, the position of the tip of the
tongue correlates with the grooved vs. hushing tongue
shape so as to maximize the dierences. However, the
palato-alveolar sibilants in the Northwest Caucasian lan-
guages such as Ubykh are an exception. These sounds
have the tongue tip resting directly against the lower teeth,
which gives the sounds a quality that Catford describes
as hissing-hushing. Ladefoged and Maddieson[3] term
this a "closed laminal postalveolar articulation, and tran-
scribe them (following Catford) as [, ], although this is
not an IPA notation. See the article on postalveolar con-
sonants for more information.
38 CHAPTER 12. SIBILANT

12.3 Symbols in the IPA 12.5 Linguistic contrasts among

sibilants
The following table shows the types of sibilant fricatives
dened in the International Phonetic Alphabet:
Not including dierences in manner of articulation or
Diacritics can be used for ner detail. For example, apical secondary articulation, some languages have as many as
and laminal alveolars can be specied as [s] vs [s]; a dental four dierent types of sibilants. For example, Northern
(or more likely denti-alveolar) sibilant as [s]; a palatalized Qiang and Southern Qiang have a four-way distinction
alveolar as [s]; and a generic retracted sibilant as [s], a among sibilant aricates /ts/ /t/ /t/ /t/, with one for
transcription frequently used for the sharper-quality types each of the four tongue shapes. Toda also has a four-
of retroex consonants (e.g. the laminal at type and way sibilant distinction, with one alveolar, one palato-
the "apico-alveolar" type). There is no diacritic to denote alveolar, and two retroex (apical postalveolar and sub-
the laminal closed articulation of palato-alveolars in the apical palatal).
Northwest Caucasian languages, but they are sometimes
The now-extinct Ubykh language was particularly com-
provisionally transcribed as [ ].
plex, with a total of 27 sibilant consonants. Not only
all four tongue shapes were represented (with the palato-
alveolar appearing in the laminal closed variation) but
12.4 Possible combinations also both the palato-alveolars and alveolo-palatals could
additionally appear labialized. Besides, there was a ve-
way manner distinction among voiceless and voiced frica-
The attested possibilities, with exemplar languages, are
tives, voiceless and voiced aricates, and ejective af-
as follows. Note that the IPA diacritics are simplied;
fricates. (The three labialized palato-alveolar aricates
some articulations would require two diacritics to be fully
were missing, which is why the total was 27, not 30.) The
specied, but only one is used in order to keep the results
Bzyp dialect of the related Abkhaz language also has a
legible without the need for OpenType IPA fonts. Also,
similar inventory.
Ladefoged has resurrected an obsolete IPA symbol, the
under dot, to indicate apical postalveolar (normally in- Some languages have four types when palatalization is
cluded in the category of retroex consonants), and that considered. Polish is one example, with both palatal-
notation is used here. (Note that the notation s, is some- ized and non-palatalized laminal denti-alveolars, laminal
times reversed; either may also be called 'retroex' and postalveolar (or at retroex), and alveolo-palatal ([s z]
written .) [s z] [s z] [ ]). Russian has the same surface contrasts,
but the alveolo-palatals are arguably not phonemic. They
^1 [ ] is an ad-hoc transcription. The old IPA letters
occur only geminate, and the retroex consonants never
are also available. ^2 These sounds are usually
occur geminate, which suggests that both are allophones
just transcribed . Apical postalveolar and subapi-
of the same phoneme.
cal palatal sibilants do not contrast in any language, but
if necessary, apical postalveolars can be transcribed with Somewhat more common are languages with three sibi-
an apical diacritic, as s z or . Ladefoged resurrects lant types, including one hissing and two hushing. As
the old retroex sub-dot for apical retroexes, Also with Polish and Russian, the two hushing types are usu-
seen in the literature on e.g. Hindi and Norwegian is ally postalveolar and alveolo-palatal since these are the
the domed articulation of [ ] precludes a subapical two most distinct from each other. Mandarin Chinese is
realization. an example of such a language. However, other possibil-
ities exist. Serbo-Croatian has alveolar, at postalveolar
and alveolo-palatal aricates whereas Basque has palato-
12.4.1 Whistled sibilants alveolar and laminal and apical alveolar (apico-alveolar)
fricatives and aricates (late Medieval peninsular Spanish
Whistled sibilants occur in speech pathology and may be and Portuguese had the same distinctions among frica-
caused by dental prostheses or orthodontics. However, tives).
they also occur phonemically in several southern Bantu Many languages, such as English, have two sibilant types,
languages, the best known being Shona. These have been one hissing and one hushing. A wide variety of languages
variously describedas labialized but not velarized, as across the world have this pattern. Perhaps most common
retroex, etc., but none of these articulations are required is the pattern, as in English, with alveolar and palato-
for the sounds.[4] Using the Extended IPA, Shona sv and alveolar sibilants. Modern northern peninsular Spanish
zv may be transcribed s and z. Other transcriptions has a single apico-alveolar sibilant fricative [s], as well
seen include purely labialized s and z (Ladefoged and as a single palato-alveolar sibilant aricate [t]. How-
Maddieson 1996) and labially co-articulated s and z ever, there are also languages with alveolar and apical
or s and z. In the otherwise IPA transcription of retroex sibilants (such as Standard Vietnamese) and with
Shona in Doke (1967), the whistled sibilants are tran- alveolar and alveolo-palatal postalveolars (e.g. alveo-
scribed with non-IPA and t d. lar and laminal palatalized [ t d] i.e. [ t d]
12.8. NOTES
in Catalan and Brazilian Portuguese, the latter probably
through Amerindian inuence,[5] and alveolar and dorsal
i.e. [ c ] proper in Japanese).[6]
Only a few languages with sibilants lack the hissing
type. Middle Vietnamese is normally reconstructed with
two sibilant fricatives, both hushing (one retroex, one
alveolo-palatal). Some languages have only a single
hushing sibilant and no hissing sibilant. That occurs in
southern Peninsular Spanish dialects of the "ceceo" type,
which have replaced the former hissing fricative with [],
leaving only [t].
Languages with no sibilants are fairly rare. Most have no
fricatives at all or only the fricative /h/. Examples include
most Australian languages, Hawaiian, and Rotokas, and
what is generally reconstructed for Proto-Bantu. Lan-
guages with fricatives but no sibilants, however, do occur,
such as Ukue in Nigeria, which has only the fricatives /f,
v, h/. Also, almost all Eastern Polynesian languages ex-
cept Hawaiian have no sibilants but do have the fricatives
/v/ and/or /f/: Mori, Tahitian, Rapa Nui, most Cook Is-
lands Mori dialects, Marquesan, and Tuamotuan.
Tamil only has the sibilant // and fricative /f/ in loan-
words, which are frequently replaced by native sounds.
The sibilants /s, / exist as allophones of /t and the frica-
tive /h/ as an allophone of /k/.
12.6 Contested denitions
Authors including Chomsky and Halle group [f] and [v]
as sibilants. However, they do not have the grooved ar-
ticulation and high frequencies of other sibilants, and
most phoneticians[7] continue to group them together with
bilabial [], [] and (inter)dental [], [] as non-sibilant
anterior fricatives. For a grouping of sibilants and [f,
v], the term strident is more common. Some researchers
judge [f] to be non-strident in English, based on mea-
surements of its comparative amplitude, but to be strident
in other languages (for example, in the African language
Ewe, where it contrasts with non-strident []).
The nature of sibilants as so-called 'obstacle fricatives is
complicated there is a continuum of possibilities relat-
ing to the angle at which the jet of air may strike an obsta-
cle. The grooving often considered necessary for classi-
cation as a sibilant has been observed in ultrasound stud-
ies of the tongue for the supposedly non-sibilant voiceless
alveolar fricative [] of English.[8]
12.7 See also
De-essing
Plosive consonant
Shibboleth
39
Sj-sound
Strident vowel
Voiceless alveolar retracted sibilant
Voiced apicoalveolar fricative
12.8 Notes
[1] Bright 1978.
[2] Dalbor (1980); Obaid (1973).
[3] Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996.
[4] Shosted 2006
[5] (Portuguese) Dialects of Brazil: the palatalization of
the phonemes /t/ and /d/. Aside of using the term
alveopalatal thoroughly, p. 27 sets it clear that Brazilian
alveolo-palatal aricates are similar to but dierent from
Italian palato-alveolar ones.
[6] (Portuguese) Anlise acstica de sequncias de fricati-
vas e africadas por japoneses aprendizes de portugus
brasileiro, Universidade Federal do Paran, page 1504
[7] Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996
[8] Stone, M. & Lundberg, A. (1996). Three-dimensional
tongue surface shapes of English consonants and vowels.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 99 (6),
pp. 37283737
12.9 References
Bright, William (1978), Sibilants and naturalness
in aboriginal California, Journal of California An-
thropology, Papers in Linguistics, 1: 3963
Dalbor, John B. (1980), Observations on Present-
Day Seseo and Ceceo in Southern Spain, Hispania,
American Association of Teachers of Spanish and
Portuguese, 63 (1): 519, doi:10.2307/340806,
JSTOR 340806
Hualde, Jos Ignacio (1991), Basque phonology,
London: Routledge, JSTOR 340806
Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The
Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
Obaid, Antonio H. (1973), The Vagaries of the
Spanish 'S'", Hispania, American Association of
Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, 56 (1): 6067,
doi:10.2307/339038, JSTOR 339038
Shosted, Ryan K. (2006) Just put your lips together
and blow? The whistled fricatives of Southern Bantu.
Chapter 13

Stop consonant

In phonetics, a stop, also known as a plosive or oral glottal stop; 'plosive' may even mean non-glottal stop. In
occlusive, is a consonant in which the vocal tract is other cases, however, it may be the word 'plosive' that is
blocked so that all airow ceases. restricted to the glottal stop. Note that, generally speak-
ing, stops do not have plosion (a release burst). In English,
The occlusion may be made with the tongue blade ([t],
[d]) or body ([k], []), lips ([p], [b]), or glottis ([]). Stops for example, there are stops with no audible release, such
as the /p/ in apt. However, pulmonic stops do have plo-
contrast with nasals, where the vocal tract is blocked but
airow continues through the nose, as in /m/ and /n/, and sion in other environments.
with fricatives, where partial occlusion impedes but does In Ancient Greek, the term for stop was
not block airow in the vocal tract. (phnon),[3] which means unpronounceable, voice-
less, or silent, because stops could not be pronounced
without a vowel. This term was calqued into Latin as m-
13.1 Terminology ta, and from there borrowed into English as mute.[4] Mute
was sometimes used instead for voiceless consonants,
whether stops or fricatives, a usage that was later replaced
The terms stop, occlusive, and plosive are often and inac-
with surd, from Latin surdus deaf or silent,[5] a term
curately used interchangeably. Linguists who distinguish
still occasionally seen in the literature.[6] For more infor-
them may not agree on the distinction being made. The
mation on the Ancient Greek terms, see Ancient Greek
terms refer to dierent features of the consonant. Stop
phonology Terminology.
refers to the airow that is stopped. Occlusive refers to
the articulation, which occludes (blocks) the vocal tract.
Plosive refers to the release burst (plosion) of the con-
sonant. Therefore, a plosive is a stop that is released, typ-
ically into a more open speech sound such as a vowel. It 13.2 Common stops
is inaccurate to call an unreleased stop a plosive. Rather,
such stops are applosives.
All languages in the world have stops,[7] and most have at
Either occlusive or stop may be used as a general term
least the voiceless stops [p], [t], and [k]. However, there
covering the other together with nasals. That is, 'occlu-
are exceptions: Colloquial Samoan lacks the coronal [t],
sive' may be dened as oral occlusives (stops/plosives)
and several North American languages, such as the north-
plus nasal occlusives (nasals such as [m], [n]), or 'stop'
ern Iroquoian and southern Iroquoian languages (i.e.,
may be dened as oral stops (plosives) plus nasal stops
Cherokee), lack the labial [p]. In fact, the labial is the
(nasals). Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996) prefer to re-
least stable of the voiceless stops in the languages of the
strict 'stop' to oral occlusives. They say,
world, as the unconditioned sound change [p] [f] (
[h] ) is quite common in unrelated languages, having
what we call simply nasals are called nasal stops occurred in the history of Classical Japanese, Classical
by some linguists. We avoid this phrase, pre- Arabic, and Proto-Celtic, for instance. Formal Samoan
ferring to reserve the term 'stop' for sounds in has only one word with velar [k]; colloquial Samoan con-
which there is a complete interruption of air- ates /t/ and /k/ to /k/. Niihau Hawaiian has [t] for /k/ to
ow.[1] a greater extent than Standard Hawaiian, but neither dis-
tinguish a /k/ from a /t/. It may be more accurate to say
In addition, they use plosive for a pulmonic stop; that Hawaiian and colloquial Samoan do not distinguish
stops in their usage include ejective and implosive velar and coronal stops than to say they lack one or the
consonants.[2] other.
If a term such as 'plosive' is used for oral obstruents, and See Common occlusives for the distribution of both stops
nasals are not called nasal stops, then a stop may mean the and nasals.

40
13.4. CLASSIFICATION
13.3 Articulation
In the articulation of the stop, three phases can be distin-
guished:
Catch: The airway closes so that no air can escape
(hence the name stop).
Hold or occlusion: The airway stays closed, causing
a slight pressure dierence to build up (hence the
name occlusive).
Release or burst: The closure is opened. The re-
leased airow produces a sudden impulse causing an
audible sound, or burst (hence the name plosive).
In many languages, such as Malay and Vietnamese, word-
nal stops lack a release burst, even when followed by a
vowel, or have a nasal release. See no audible release.
Nasal occlusives are somewhat similar. In the catch and
hold, airow continues through the nose; in the release,
there is no burst, and nal nasals are typically unreleased
across most languages.
In aricates, the catch and hold are those of a stop, but longer than in simple consonants. In languages where
the release is that of a fricative. That is, aricates are stops are only distinguished by length (e.g., Arabic, Il-
stopfricative contours.
13.4 Classication
13.4.1 Voice
Voiced stops are pronounced with vibration of the vocal
cords, voiceless stops without. Stops are commonly
voiceless, and many languages, such as Mandarin Chinese
and Hawaiian, have only voiceless stops. Others, such as
most Australian languages, are indeterminate: stops may
vary between voiced and voiceless without distinction.
13.4.2 Aspiration
In aspirated stops, the vocal cords (vocal folds) are ab-
ducted at the time of release. In a prevocalic aspirated
stop (a stop followed by a vowel or sonorant), the time
when the vocal cords begin to vibrate will be delayed un-
til the vocal folds come together enough for voicing to
begin, and will usually start with breathy voicing. The
duration between the release of the stop and the voice
onset is called the voice onset time (VOT) or the aspira-
tion interval. Highly aspirated stops have a long period
of aspiration, so that there is a long period of voiceless
airow (a phonetic [h]) before the onset of the vowel. In
tenuis stops, the vocal cords come together for voicing
immediately following the release, and there is little or
no aspiration (a voice onset time close to zero). In En-
glish, there may be a brief segment of breathy voice that
41
identies the stop as voiceless and not voiced. In voiced
stops, the vocal folds are set for voice before the release,
and often vibrate during the entire hold, and in English,
the voicing after release is not breathy. A stop is called
fully voiced if it is voiced during the entire occlusion.
In English, however, initial voiced stops like /#b/ or /#d/
may have no voicing during the period of occlusion, or
the voicing may start shortly before the release and con-
tinue after release, though word-nal stops tend to be fully
voiced: In most dialects of English, the nal g in the bag
is likely to be fully voiced, whereas the initial b will only
be voiced during part of its occlusion. Initial voiceless
stops, like the p in pie, are aspirated, with a palpable pu
of air upon release, whereas a stop after an s, as in spy, is
tenuis (unaspirated). When spoken near a candle ame,
the ame will icker more after the words par, tar, and
car are articulated, compared with spar, star, and scar.
In the common pronunciation of papa, the initial p is as-
pirated whereas the medial p is not.
13.4.3 Length
In a geminate or long consonant, the occlusion lasts
wana, Icelandic), the long stops may be held up to three
times as long as the short stops. Italian is well known for
its geminate stops, as the double t in the name Vittoria
takes just as long to say as the ct does in English Victoria.
Japanese also prominently features geminate consonants,
such as in the minimal pair kita 'came' and kitta
'cut'.
Note that there are many languages where the features
voice, aspiration, and length reinforce each other, and in
such cases it may be hard to determine which of these
features predominates. In such cases, the terms fortis
is sometimes used for aspiration or gemination, whereas
lenis is used for single, tenuous, or voiced stops. Be
aware, however, that the terms fortis and lenis are poorly
dened, and their meanings vary from source to source.
13.4.4 Nasalization
Further information: Nasal consonant and Nasalization
Simple nasals are dierentiated from stops only by a low-
ered velum that allows the air to escape through the nose
during the occlusion. Nasals are acoustically sonorants,
as they have a non-turbulent airow and are nearly always
voiced, but they are articulatorily obstruents, as there is
complete blockage of the oral cavity. The term occlusive
may be used as a cover term for both nasals and stops.
A prenasalized stop starts out with a lowered velum that
raises during the occlusion. The closest examples in En-
glish are consonant clusters such as the [nd] in candy,
42
but many languages have prenasalized stops that func-
tion phonologically as single consonants. Swahili is well
known for having words beginning with prenasalized
stops, as in ndege 'bird', and in many languages of the
South Pacic, such as Fijian, these are even spelled with
single letters: b [mb], d [nd].
A postnasalized stop begins with a raised velum that low-
ers during the occlusion. This causes an audible nasal re-
lease, as in English sudden. This could also be compared
to the /dn/ cluster found in Russian and other Slavic lan-
guages, which can be seen in the name of the Dnieper
River.
Note that the terms prenasalization and postnasalization
are normally used only in languages where these sounds
are phonemic: that is, not analyzed into sequences of stop
plus nasal.
13.4.5 Airstream mechanism
Stops may be made with more than one airstream mecha-
nism. The normal mechanism is pulmonic egressive, that
is, with air owing outward from the lungs. All languages
have pulmonic stops. Some languages have stops made
with other mechanisms as well: ejective stops (glottalic
egressive), implosive stops (glottalic ingressive), or click
consonants (lingual ingressive).
13.4.6 Tenseness
Further information: Tenseness
A fortis stop (in the narrow sense) is produced with more
muscular tension than a lenis stop (in the narrow sense).
However, this is dicult to measure, and there is usually
debate over the actual mechanism of alleged fortis or lenis
consonants.
There are a series of stops in the Korean language, some-
times written with the IPA symbol for ejectives, which are
produced using "sti voice", meaning there is increased
contraction of the glottis than for normal production of
voiceless stops. The indirect evidence for sti voice is in
the following vowels, which have a higher fundamental
frequency than those following other stops. The higher
frequency is explained as a result of the glottis being
tense. Other such phonation types include breathy voice,
or murmur; slack voice; and creaky voice.
13.5 Transcription
The following stops have been given dedicated symbols
in the IPA.
CHAPTER 13. STOP CONSONANT
13.5.1 English
13.5.2 Variations
Many subclassications of stops are transcribed by adding
a diacritic or modier letter to the IPA symbols above.
13.6 See also
Continuant (the opposite of a stop)
List of phonetics topics
Pop lter
Nonexplosive stop
13.7 References
[1] Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of
the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 102. ISBN
0-631-19814-8.
[2] Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of
the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 7778.
ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
[3] . Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek
English Lexicon at the Perseus Project
[4] mute. Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). Oxford Uni-
versity Press. September 2005. (Subscription or UK pub-
lic library membership required.)
[5] surdus. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short. A Latin
Dictionary on Perseus Project.
[6] surd. Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed.). Oxford Uni-
versity Press. September 2005. (Subscription or UK pub-
lic library membership required.)
[7] Knig, W. (ed) dtv Atlas zur deutschen Sprache dtv 1994
Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The
Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
Ian Maddieson, Patterns of Sounds, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1984. ISBN 0-521-26536-3
13.8 External links
Rothenberg M. The Breath-Stream Dynamics of
Simple-Released Plosive Production. Vol. 6. Bib-
liotheca Phonetica, Karger, Basel, 1968
Chapter 14

Tenseness

This article is about a contrast in vowels. For other uses, is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels.
see Tension (disambiguation). There are also linguists (Lass 1976, 1-39) who believe
that there is no phonetic correlation to the tenselax op-
In phonology, tenseness or tensing is the pronunciation position.
of a vowel with narrower mouth width (often, with the In many Germanic languages, such as RP English,
tongue being raised) and usually with less centralization Standard German, and Dutch, tense vowels are longer in
and longer duration compared with another vowel,[1] thus duration than lax vowels, but in Scots, Scottish English,
causing a phonemic contrast between the two vowels. and Icelandic, there is no such correlation.
Contrast between vowels on the basis of tenseness is com- Germanic languages have lax vowels generally only in
mon in many languages, including English; for example, closed syllables and so they are also called checked vow-
in most English dialects, [i] (as in the word beet) is the els. The tense vowels are called free vowels, as they often
tense counterpart to the lax // (as in bit), and /u/ (as in occur the end of a syllable.
kook) is the tense counterpart to the lax // (as in cook).
The opposite quality of tenseness, in which a vowel is pro-
duced as relatively more widened (often lowered), cen-
tralized, and shortened is called laxness or laxing. 14.2 Consonants
Unlike most distinctive features, the feature [tense] can
Occasionally, tenseness has been used to distinguish pairs
be interpreted only relatively, often with a perception of
of contrasting consonants in languages. Korean, for ex-
greater tension or pressure in the mouth, which, in a lan-
ample, has a three-way contrast among stops and af-
guage like English, contrasts between two corresponding
fricates; the three series are often transcribed as [p t t
vowel types: a tense vowel and a lax vowel. An example
k] - [p t t k] - [p t t k ]. The contrast between the [p]
in Vietnamese is the letters and representing lax vow-
series and the [p] series is sometimes said to be a function
els, and the letters a and representing the corresponding
of tenseness: the former are lax and the latter tense. In
tense vowels. Some languages like Spanish are often con-
this case the denition of tense would have to include
sidered as having only tense vowels, but since the quality
greater glottal tension; see Korean phonology.
of tenseness is not a phonemic feature in this language,
it cannot be applied to describe its vowels in any mean- In Ewe, /f/ and /v/ are articulated with a strong articula-
ingful way. The term has also occasionally been used to tion, [f] and [v], to better distinguish them from weaker
describe contrasts in consonants. // and //.
In some dialects of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, there is a
contrast between [l, l, n, n] and [, , n, ]. Again,
14.1 Vowels the former set have sometimes been described as lax and
the latter set as tense. It is not clear what phonetic char-
In general, tense vowels are more close (and correspond- acteristics other than greater duration would then be as-
ingly have lower rst formants) than their lax counter- sociated with tenseness.
parts. Tense vowels are sometimes claimed to be articu- Some researchers have argued that the contrast in
lated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels, German, traditionally described as voice ([p t k] vs. [b
but this varies, and in some languages, it is the lax vowels d ]), is in fact better analyzed as tenseness since the
that are more advanced, or a single language may be in- latter set is voiceless in Southern German. German lin-
consistent between front and back or high and mid vow- guists call the distinction fortis and lenis rather than tense
els (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996, 3024). The tra- and lax. Tenseness is especially used to explain stop con-
ditional denition, that tense vowels are produced with sonants of the Alemannic German dialects because they
more muscular tension than lax vowels, has not been have two series of them that are identically voiceless and
conrmed by phonetic experiments. Another hypothesis unaspirated. However, it is debated whether the distinc-

43
44 CHAPTER 14. TENSENESS

tion is really a result of dierent muscular tension and not

of gemination.

14.3 See also

Checked and free vowels

Vowel reduction

Fortis and lenis

Trisyllabic laxing

14.4 Sources
Giegerich, Heinz J. (1992). English Phonology: An
Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-
521-33603-1.
Jessen, Michael (1998). Phonetics and Phonology of
Tense and Lax Obstruents in German. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins. ISBN 90-272-1553-7.

Kim, Nam-Kil (1987). Korean. In Bernard Com-

rie, ed. The Worlds Major Languages. Oxford Uni-
versity Press. pp. 88198. ISBN 0-415-60902-X.
Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The
Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.

Lass, Roger (1976). English Phonology and Phono-

logical Theory. Cambridge University Press. ISBN
0-521-21039-9.

Siadhail, Mchel (1989). Modern Irish: Gram-

matical Structure and Dialectal Variation. Cam-
bridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-42519-0.

14.5 References
[1] Halle, Morris (1977). Tenseness, Vowel Shift, and the
Phonology of the Back Vowels in Modern English. Lin-
guistic Inquiry 8.4. p. 611.
Chapter 15

Trill consonant

In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by be more economical.[2] There are also so-called strident
vibrations between the active articulator and passive ar- vowels which are accompanied by epiglottal trill.
ticulator. Standard Spanish <rr> as in perro, for example
The cells in the IPA chart for the velar, (upper) pharyn-
is an alveolar trill. geal, and glottal places of articulation are shaded as im-
Trills are very dierent from aps. Whereas with a ap possible. (The glottis quite readily vibrates, but this oc-
(or tap), a specic gesture is used to strike the active ar- curs as the phonation of vowels and consonants, not as
ticulator against the passive one, in the case of a trill the a consonant of its own.) According to Esling (2010),[3]
articulator is held in place, where the airstream causes it palatal trills are also implausible. The upper pharyn-
to vibrate. Usually a trill vibrates for 23 periods, but may geal tract cannot reliably produce a trill, but the epiglot-
be up to 5, or even more if geminate. However, trills may tis does, and epiglottal trills are pharyngeal in the broad
also be produced with only a single period. Although this sense.[3] A partially devoiced pre-uvular (i.e. between
might seem like a ap, the articulation is dierent; trills velar and uvular) fricative trill [] has been reported to
will vary in the number of periods, but aps do not. occur as coda allophone of // in Limburgish dialects of
Maastricht and Weert. It is in free variation with partially
devoiced uvular fricative trill [] .[4][5]
15.1 Phonemic trills Voiceless trills occur phonemically in e.g. Welsh and
Icelandic. (See also voiceless alveolar trill, voiceless
Trill consonants included in the International Phonetic retroex trill, voiceless uvular trill.) Mangbetu and Ninde
Alphabet: have phonemically voiceless bilabial trills.
The Czech language has two contrastive alveolar trills,
[r] - alveolar trill one a fricative trill (written in the orthography). In the
fricative trill the tongue is raised, so that there is audible
[] - bilabial trill frication during the trill, sounding a little like a simultane-
[] - uvular trill ous [r] and [] (or [r] and [] when devoiced). A symbol
for this sound, [], has been dropped from the IPA, and it
[] - voiceless epiglottal trill is now generally transcribed as a raised r, [r].
[] - voiced epiglottal trill Liangshan Yi (Cool Mountain Yi) has two buzzed or
fricative vowels /i/, /u/ (written , i) which may also be
trilled, [], [r].
In addition,
A number of languages have trilled aricates such as
[] - velopharyngeal fricative found in disordered [mb] and [d]. The Chapakuran language Wari and
speech sometimes involves trilling of the velopha- the Muran language Pirah have a very unusual trilled
ryngeal port, producing a 'snort'. phoneme, a voiceless bilabially post-trilled dental stop,
[t ].
The bilabial trill is uncommon. The coronal trill is most A nasal trill [r] has been described from some dialects
frequently alveolar [r], but dental and postalveolar ar- of Romanian, and is posited as an intermediate historical
ticulations [r] and [r] also occur. An alleged retroex step in rhotacism. However, the phonetic variation of the
trill found in Toda has been transcribed [] (that is, the sound is considerable, and it is not clear how frequently it
same as the retroex ap), but might be less ambiguously is actually trilled.[6]
written [r], as only the onset is retroex, with the ac-
tual trill being alveolar. The epiglottal trills are identied
by the IPA as fricatives, with the trilling assumed to be
allophonic.[1] However, analyzing the sounds as trills may

45
46 CHAPTER 15. TRILL CONSONANT

15.2 Extralinguistic trills 15.6 Bibliography

A linguolabial trill [r] is not known to be used phonemi- Gussenhoven, Carlos; Aarts, Flor (1999), The
cally, but occurs when blowing a raspberry. dialect of Maastricht (PDF), Journal of the In-
ternational Phonetic Association, University of Ni-
Snoring typically consists of vibration of the uvula and the
jmegen, Centre for Language Studies, 29: 155166,
soft palate (velum). Although the former part is simply a
doi:10.1017/S0025100300006526
uvular trill, there is no standard linguistic term for the lat-
ter. It does not constitute a velar trill, because the velum Heijmans, Linda; Gussenhoven, Carlos (1998),
is here the active articulator, not the passive; the tongue The Dutch dialect of Weert (PDF), Journal of
is not involved at all. (Speculative Grammarian has fa- the International Phonetic Association, 28: 107112,
mously proposed a jocular symbol for this sound (also the doi:10.1017/S0025100300006307
sound used to imitate a pigs snort), a double-wide with
double dot, suggesting a pigs snout.[7] The Extensions to Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The
the IPA identies a fricative pronounced with this same Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
conguration as velopharyngeal.) well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
Lateral trills are also possible. They may be pronounced
by initiating [] or [] with an especially forceful airow.
There is no symbol for them in the IPA. Lateral coronal
trills are sometimes used to imitate bird calls, and are a
component of Donald Duck talk. A labiodental trill, [],
is most likely to be lateral, but laterality is not distinctive
among labial sounds.
Ejective trills are not known from any language, despite
being easy to produce. They may occur as mimesis of a
cats purr.

15.3 Summary

15.4 See also

List of phonetics topics

Bronx cheer (gesture)

15.5 References
[1] listen (epiglottal fricative)

[2] John Esling (2010) Phonetic Notation, in Hardcastle,

Laver & Gibbon (eds) The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences,
2nd ed., p 695.

[3] John Esling (2010) Phonetic Notation, in Hardcastle,

Laver & Gibbon (eds) The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences,
2nd ed.

[4] Gussenhoven & Aarts (1999:156)

[5] Heijmans & Gussenhoven (1998:108)

[6] Rodney Sampson (1999) Nasal Vowel Evolution in Ro-

mance, OUP, pp 312313

[7] SpecGramLetters to the Editor. specgram.com.

Chapter 16
Vocal folds
Vocal folds(open)
Vocal folds(speaking)
The vocal folds, also known commonly as vocal cords or
voice reeds, are composed of twin infoldings of mucous
membrane stretched horizontally, from back to front, 16.1.2 False vocal folds
across the larynx. They vibrate, modulating the ow of
air being expelled from the lungs during phonation.[1][2][3] Main article: Vestibular fold
Open when breathing and vibrating for speech or singing,
the folds are controlled via the vagus nerve.
47
16.1 Structure
The vocal folds are located within the larynx at the top
of the trachea. They are attached posteriorly to the
arytenoid cartilages, and anteriorly to the thyroid carti-
lage. They are part of the glottis which includes the rima
glottidis. Their outer edges are attached to muscle in the
larynx while their inner edges, or margins, are free form-
ing the opening called the rima glottidis. They are con-
structed from epithelium, but they have a few muscle -
bres in them, namely the vocalis muscle which tightens
the front part of the ligament near to the thyroid carti-
lage. They are at triangular bands and are pearly white
in color. Above both sides of the glottis are the two
vestibular folds or false vocal folds which have a small
sac between them.
Situated above the larynx, the epiglottis acts as a ap
which closes o the trachea during the act of swallowing
to direct food into the esophagus. If food or liquid does
enter the trachea and contacts the vocal folds it causes
a cough reex to expel the matter in order to prevent
pulmonary aspiration.
16.1.1 Variations
Males and females have dierent vocal fold sizes. Adult
male voices are usually lower pitched due to longer and
thicker folds. The male vocal folds are between 1.75 cm
and 2.5 cm (approx 0.75 to 1.0) in length,[2] while fe-
male vocal folds are between 1.25 cm and 1.75 cm (ap-
prox 0.5 to 0.75) in length. The vocal cords of children
are much shorter than those of adult males and females.
The dierence in vocal fold length and thickness between
males and females causes a dierence in vocal pitch. Ad-
ditionally, genetic factors cause variations between mem-
bers of the same sex, with males and females voices be-
ing categorized into voice types.
The vocal folds are sometimes called 'true vocal folds
48
to distinguish them from the 'false vocal folds known
as vestibular folds or ventricular folds. These are a pair
of thick folds of mucous membrane that protect and sit
slightly superior to the more delicate true folds. They
have a minimal role in normal phonation, but are often
used to produce deep sonorous tones in Tibetan chant and
Tuvan throat singing,[4] as well as in musical screaming
and the death growl vocal style.
16.1.3 Histology
Main article: Histology of the vocal folds
Mature human vocal folds are composed of layered struc-
tures which are quite dierent at the histological level.
The topmost layer comprises stratied squamous epithe-
lium which is bordered by ciliated pseudostratied ep-
ithelium. The inner lining surface of this squamous ep-
ithelium is covered by a layer of mucus (acting as a
mucociliary clearance), which is composed of two lay-
ers: a mucinous layer and serous layer. Both mucus layers
provide viscous and watery environment for cilia beating
posteriorally and superiorly. The mucociliary clearance
keeps the vocal folds essentially moist and lubricated.[5]
The epidermis layer is secured to the deeper connec-
tive tissue by basement membrane. Due to the pri-
marily amorphous brous and nonbrous proteins in the
lamina propria, the basement membrane applies strong
anchoring laments like collagen and to secure
the hemidesmosome of basal cell to the lamina propria.
These attachments are strong enough to sustain beating
and stretch, to which VFs are subjected.[5] The popula-
tion density of some of the anchoring bers in the base-
ment membrane, such as collagen , is genetically de- 16.1.4 Development
termined, and these genetics may inuence the health and
pathogenesis of the vocal folds.[6]
Larynx showing vocal ligaments
The next three layers comprise lamina LPs, which is
stratied by their histological composition of elastin
and collagen bers, with broblast, myobroblast and
macrophages interspersed sparsely.[5] The supercial
layer LPs (SLLPs), also known as Reinkes space, is com-
posed of amorphous substance and microbrils[7] which
allows this cover layer to slide over the deep layer
easily.[8] The vibratory and viscoelastic characteristics of
CHAPTER 16. VOCAL FOLDS
human VFs are mainly attributed to the molecular com-
position of SLLPs. In normal vocal fold, the jelly-like
Reinkes space is very loose and abundant with inter-
stitial proteins such as hyaluronic acid, bronectin, pro-
teoglycan like bromodulin, decorin and versican. All
these ECM components together regulate the water con-
tent of vocal fold and render the viscous shear property
for it.[9][10] The squamous epithelium and supercial lam-
ina propria form the vocal mucosa which serves as vibra-
tory component in phonation. The mucosa layer vibrates
at a frequency range of 1001000 Hz and displacement
at 1mm approximately.[11] The intermediate layer of LPs
consists primarily of elastic ber while the deep layer LP
consists of fewer elastin and more collagen bers. These
two layers have poor dierentiated boundary but are in-
creasingly stier than SLLPs. The intermediate and deep
layers of LPs compose the vocal ligaments which are
enclosed within the vocal folds and are responsible for
strain in phonation. Within the ECM community of vo-
cal ligament, brous proteins such as elastin and colla-
gen are pivotal in maintaining the proper elastic biome-
chanical property of vocal fold.[8] Elastin bers impart
the exibility and elasticity of the vocal folds and, col-
lagen is responsible for the resistance and resiliece to
tensile strength.[12] The normal strain level of vocal lig-
ament ranges from 015% during phonation[8] These -
brous proteins exhibit distribution variations spatially and
temporally due to broblast turnover during tissue matu-
ration and aging.[7][13] Each vocal ligament is a band of
yellow elastic tissue attached in front to the angle of the
thyroid cartilage, and behind to the vocal process of the
arytenoid cartilage.
In newborns
Newborns have a uniform monolayered lamina pro-
pria, which appears loose with no vocal ligament.[14]
The monolayered lamina propria is composed of ground
substances such as hyaluronic acid and bronectin,
broblasts, elastic bers, and collagenous bers. While
the brous components are sparse, making the lamina
propria structure loose, the hyaluronic acid (HA) content
is high.
HA is a bulky, negatively charged glycosaminoglycan,
whose strong anity with water procures HA its vis-
coelastic and shock absorbing properties essential to vo-
cal biomechanics.[15] Viscosity and elasticity are critical
to voice production. Chan, Gray and Titze, quantied the
eect of HA on both the viscosity and the elasticity of vo-
cal folds (VF) by comparing the properties of tissues with
and without HA.[16] The results showed that removal of
HA decreased the stiness of VF by an average of 35%,
but increased their dynamic viscosity by an average of
70% at frequencies higher than 1 Hz. Newborns have
been shown to cry an average of 6.7 hours per day dur-
16.1. STRUCTURE
ing the rst 3 months, with a sustained pitch of 400600
Hz, and a mean duration per day of 2 hours.[17] Similar
treatment on adult VF would quickly result in edema, and
subsequently aphonia. Schweinfurth and al. presented
the hypothesis that high hyaluronic acid content and dis-
tribution in newborn VF is directly associated with new-
born crying endurance.[17] These dierences in newborn
vocal fold composition would also be responsible for new-
borns inability to articulate sounds, besides the fact that
their lamina propria is a uniform structure with no vo-
cal ligament. The layered structure necessary for phona-
tion will start to develop during the infancy and until the
adolescence.[14]
The broblasts in the newborn Reinkes space are im-
mature, showing an oval shape, and a large nucleus-
cytoplasm ratio.[14] The rough endoplasmic reticulum and
Golgi apparatus, as shown by electron micrographs, are
not well developed, indicating that the cells are in a resting
phase. The collagenous and reticular bers in the new-
born VF are fewer than in the adult one, adding to the
immaturity of the vocal fold tissue.
In the infant, many brous components were seen to ex-
tend from the macula ava towards the Reinkes space.
Fibronectin is very abundant in the Reinkes space of
newborn and infant. Fibronectin is a glycoprotein that
is believed to act as a template for the oriented deposi-
tion of the collagen bers, stabilizing the collagen b-
rils. Fibronectin also acts as a skeleton for the elastic tis-
sue formation.[14] Reticular and collagenous bers were
seen to run along the edges of the VF throughout the en-
tire lamina propria.[14] Fibronectin in the Reinkes space
appeared to guide those bers and orient the bril de-
position. The elastic bers remained sparse and imma-
ture during infancy, mostly made of microbrils. The -
broblasts in the infant Reinkes space were still sparse but
spindle-shaped. Their rough endoplasmic reticulum and
Golgi apparatus were still not well developed, indicating
that despite the change in shape, the broblasts still re-
mained mostly in a resting phase. Few newly released ma-
terials were seen adjacent to the broblasts. The ground
substance content in the infant Reinkes space seemed to
decrease over time, as the brous component content in-
creased, thus slowly changing the vocal fold structure.
In adults
Human VF are paired structures located in the larynx,
just above the trachea, which vibrate and are brought in
contact during phonation. The human VF are roughly 12
24 mm in length, and 35 mm thick.[18] Histologically,
the human VF are a laminated structure composed of ve
dierent layers. The vocalis muscle, main body of the
VF, is covered by the mucosa, which consists of the ep-
ithelium and the lamina propria.[19] The latter is a pliable
layer of connective tissue subdivided into three layers: the
supercial layer (SLP), the intermediate layer (ILP), and
the deep layer (DLP).[5] Layer distinction is either made
49
looking at dierential in cell content or extracellular ma-
trix (ECM) content. The most common way being to
look at the ECM content. The SLP has fewer elastic and
collagenous bers than the two other layers, and thus is
looser and more pliable. The ILP is mostly composed of
elastic bers, while the DLP has fewer elastic bers, and
more collagenous bers.[19] In those two layers, which
form what is known as the vocalis ligament, the elastic
and collagenous bers are densely packed as bundles that
run almost parallel to the edge of the vocal fold.[19]
The extracellular matrix of the VF LP is com-
posed of brous proteins such as collagen and elastin,
and interstitial molecules such as HA, a non-sulfated
glycosaminoglycan.[5] While the SLP is rather poor in
elastic and collagenous bers, the ILP and DLP are
mostly composed of it, with the concentration of elas-
tic bers decreasing and the concentration of collagenous
bers increasing as the vocalis muscle is approached.[19]
Fibrous proteins and interstitial molecules play dierent
roles within the ECM. While collagen (mostly type I) pro-
vides strength and structural support to the tissue, which
are useful to withstanding stress and resisting deformation
when subjected to a force, elastin bers bring elasticity
to the tissue, allowing it to return to its original shape
after deformation.[5] Interstitial proteins, such as HA,
plays important biological and mechanical roles in the
VF tissue.[15] In the VF tissue, HA plays a role of shear-
thinner, aecting the tissue viscosity, space-ller, shock
absorber, as well as wound healing and cell migration pro-
moter. The distribution of those proteins and interstitial
molecules has been proven to be aected by both age and
gender, and is maintained by the broblasts.[5][9][15][20]
Maturation
Vocal fold structure in adults is quite dierent from that
in newborns. Exactly how the VF mature from an imma-
ture monolayer in newborns to a mature three layer tissue
in adults is still unknown, however a few studies have in-
vestigated the subjects and brought some answers.
Hirano et al. previously found that the newborns did not
have a true lamina propria, but instead had cellular re-
gions called maculae avae, located at the anterior and
posterior ends of the loose vocal fold tissue.[14][21] Bose-
ley and Hartnick examined at the development and mat-
uration of pediatric human vocal fold lamina propria.[22]
Hartnick was the rst one to dene each layer by a change
in their cellular concentration.[23] He also found that the
lamina propria monolayer at birth and shortly thereafter
was hypercellular, thus conrming Hiranos observations.
By 2 months of age, the vocal fold started dierenti-
ating into a bilaminar structure of distinct cellular con-
centration, with the supercial layer being less densely
populated than the deeper layer. By 11 months, a three-
layered structure starts to be noted in some specimens,
again with dierent cellular population densities. The
supercial layer is still hypocellular, followed by an in-
50 CHAPTER 16. VOCAL FOLDS

termediate more hypercellular layer, and a deeper hyper- fold biomechanics. In fact, HA has been described as the
cellular layer, just above the vocalis muscle. Even though ECM molecule that not only contributes to the mainte-
the VF seem to start organizing, this is not representa- nance of an optimal tissue viscosity that allows phona-
tive of the trilaminar structure seen in adult tissues, where tion, but also of an optimal tissue stiness that allows
the layer are dened by their dierential elastin and col- frequency control.[16] CD44 is a cell surface receptor for
lagen ber compositions. By 7 years of age, all speci- HA. Cells such as broblasts are responsible for synthe-
mens show a three-layered vocal fold structure, based on sizing ECM molecules. Cell surface matrix receptors in
cellular population densities. At this point, the super- return, feed back to the cells through cell-matrix interac-
cial layer was still hypocellular, the middle layer was the tion, allowing the cell to regulate its metabolism.
hypercellualr one, with also a greater content of elastin Sato et al.[25] carried out a histopathologic investigation
and collagen bers, and the deeper layer was less cellu-
of unphonated human VF. Vocal fold mucosae, which
larly populated. Again, the distinction seen between the were unphonated since birth, of three young adults (17,
layers at this stage is not comparable to that seen in the
24, and 28 years old) were looked at using light and
adult tissue. The maturation of the VF did not appear electron microscopy. Interestingly, the results show that
before 13 years of age, where the layers could be dened
the vocal fold mucosae were hypoplastic, and rudimen-
by their dierential ber composition rather than by their tary, and like newborns, did not have any vocal ligament,
dierential cellular population. The pattern now show a Reinkes space, or layered structure. Like newborns, the
hypocellular supercial layer, followed by a middle layer lamina propria appeared as a uniform structure. Some
composed predominantly of elastin ber, and a deeper stellate cells were present in the macula ava, but started
layer composed predominantly of collagen bers. This to show some signs of degeneration. The stellate cells
pattern can be seen in older specimens up to 17 years of synthesized fewer ECM molecules, and the cytoplasmic
age, and above. While this study oers a nice way to see processes were shown to be short and shrinking, suggest-
the evolution from immature to mature VF, it still does ing a decreased activity. Those results conrm the hy-
not explain what is the mechanism behind it. pothesis that phonation stimulates stellate cells into pro-
ducing more ECM.
Macula avae Furthermore, using a specially designed bioreactor, Titze
et al. showed that broblasts exposed to mechani-
Maculae avae are located at the anterior and posterior cal stimulation have diering levels of ECM produc-
ends of the membranous parts of the VF.[24] The histo- tion from broblasts that are not exposed to mechanical
logical structure of the macula ava is unique, and Sato stimulation.[26] The gene expression levels of ECM con-
and Hirano speculated that it could play an important role stituents such as bronectin, MMP1, decorin, bromod-
in growth, development and aging of VF. The macula ulin, HA synthase 2, and CD44 were altered. All those
ava is composed of broblasts, ground substances, elas- genes are involved in ECM remodeling, thus suggesting
tic and collagenous bers. Fibroblasts were numerous that mechanical forces applied to the tissue, alter the ex-
and spindle or stellate-shaped. The broblasts have been pression levels of ECM related genes, which in turn al-
observed to be in active phase, with some newly released low the cells present in the tissue to regulate the ECM
amorphous materials present at their surface. From a constituent synthesis, thus aecting the tissues composi-
biomechanical point of view, the role of the macula ava tion, structure, and biomechanical properties. In the end,
is very important. Hirano and Sato studies suggested cell-surface receptors close the loop by giving feedback
that the macula ava is responsible for the synthesis of on the surrounding ECM to the cells, aecting also their
the brous components of the VF. Fibroblasts have been gene expression level.
found mostly aligned in the direction of the vocal liga-
ment, along bundles of bers. It then was suggested that
the mechanical stresses during phonation were stimulat- Impact of hormones
ing the broblasts to synthesize those bers.
Other studies suggest that hormones play also an im-
portant role in vocal fold maturation. Hormones are
Impact of phonation molecules secreted into the blood stream to be delivered
at dierent targeted sites. They usually promote growth,
The viscoelastic properties of human vocal fold lamina dierentiation and functionality in dierent organs or tis-
propria are essential for their vibration, and depend on sues. Their eect is due to their ability to bind to intracel-
the composition and structure of their extracellular ma- lular receptors, modulating the gene expression, and sub-
trix (ECM). Adult VF have a layered structure which sequently regulating protein synthesis.[27] The interaction
is based on the layers dierential in ECM distribution. between the endocrine system and tissues such as breast,
Newborns on the other hand, do not have this layered brain, testicles, heart, bones, etc., is being extensively
structure. Their VF are uniform, and immature, mak- studied. It has clearly been seen that the larynx is some-
ing their viscoelastic properties most likely unsuitable for what aected by hormonal changes, but surprisingly, very
phonation. HA plays a very important role in the vocal few studies are working on elucidating this relationship.
16.3. CLINICAL SIGNIFICANCE
The eect of hormonal changes in voice is clearly seen 16.2.1
when hearing male and female voices, or when listening
to a teenage voice changing during puberty. Actually,
it is believed that the number of hormonal receptors in
the pre-pubertal phase is higher than in any other age.[27]
Menstruation has also been seen to inuence the voice.
In fact, singers are encouraged by their instructors not to
perform during their pre-menstrual period, because of a
drop in their voice quality.[27]
Vocal fold phonatory functions are known to change from
birth to old age. The most signicant changes occur
in development between birth and puberty, and in old
age.[19][28] Hirano et al. previously described several
structural changes associated with aging, in the vocal fold
tissue.[29] Some of those changes are: a shortening of the
membranous vocal fold in males, a thickening of the vo-
cal fold mucosa and cover in females, and a development
of edema in the supercial lamina propria layer in both
sexes. Hammond et al. observed that the HA content
in the vocal fold lamina propria was signicantly higher
in males than in females.[9] Although all those studies did
show that there are clear structural and functional changes
seen in the human VF which are associated with gender
and age, none really fully elucidated the underlying cause
of those changes. In fact, only a few recent studies started
to look at the presence and role of hormone receptors in
the VF. Newman et al. found that hormone receptors are
indeed present in the VF, and show a statistical distribu-
tion dierence with respect to age and gender.[28] They
have identied the presence of androgen, estrogen, and
progesterone receptors in epithelial cells, granular cells
and broblasts of VF, suggesting that some of the struc-
tural changes seen in the VF could be due to hormonal
inuences.[28] In this specic study, androgen and pro-
gesterone receptors were found more commonly in males
than in females. In others studies, it has been suggested
that the estrogen/androgen ratio be partly responsible for
the voice changes observed at menopause.[30] As previ-
ously said, Hammond et al. showed than the HA con-
tent was higher in male than in female VF. Bentley et al.
demonstrated that sex skin swelling seen in monkey was
due to an increase in HA content, which was in fact me-
diated by estrogen receptors in dermal broblasts.[31] An
increase in collagen biosynthesis mediated by the estro-
gen receptors of dermal broblasts was also observed. A
connection between hormone levels, and ECM distribu-
tion in VF depending on age and gender could be made.
More particularly a connection between higher hormone
levels and higher HA content in males could exist in the
human vocal fold tissue. Although a relationship between
hormone levels and ECM biosynthesis in vocal fold can be
established, the details of this relationship, and the mech-
anisms of the inuence has not been elucidated yet.
16.2 Function
51
Oscillation
The vocal folds in motion.
The larynx is a major (but not the only) source of sound
in speech, generating sound through the rhythmic open-
ing and closing of the vocal folds. To oscillate, the vocal
folds are brought near enough together such that air pres-
sure builds up beneath the larynx. The folds are pushed
apart by this increased subglottal pressure, with the in-
ferior part of each fold leading the superior part. Such a
wave-like motion causes a transfer of energy from the air-
ow to the fold tissues.[32] Under the correct conditions,
the energy transferred to the tissues is large enough to
overcome losses by dissipation and the oscillation pattern
will sustain itself. In essence, sound is generated in the
larynx by chopping up a steady ow of air into little pus
of sound waves.[33] (video)
The perceived pitch of a persons voice is determined
by a number of dierent factors, most importantly the
fundamental frequency of the sound generated by the lar-
ynx. The fundamental frequency is inuenced by the
length, size, and tension of the vocal folds. This fre-
quency averages about 125 Hz in an adult male, 210 Hz
in adult females, and over 300 Hz in children. Depth-
Kymography[34] is an imaging method to visualize the
complex horizontal and vertical movements of vocal
folds.
The vocal folds generate a sound rich in harmonics. The
harmonics are produced by collisions of the vocal folds
with themselves, by recirculation of some of the air back
through the trachea, or both.[35] Some singers can isolate
some of those harmonics in a way that is perceived as
singing in more than one pitch at the same timea tech-
nique called overtone singing or throat singing such as in
the tradition of Tuvan throat singing.
16.3 Clinical signicance
52 CHAPTER 16. VOCAL FOLDS

16.3.1 Wound healing nition of the word "chord". While both spellings have
historical precedents, standard American spelling is 'vo-
Wound healing is a natural regeneration process of der- cal cords.[46] According to the Oxford English Corpus,
mal and epidermal tissue involving a sequence of bio- a database of 21st-century texts that contains everything
chemical events. These events are complex and can be from academic journal articles to unedited writing and
categorized into three stages: inammation, proliferation blog entries, contemporary writers opt for the nonstan-
and tissue remodeling.[36] The study on vocal fold wound dard 'chords instead of 'cords 49% of the time.[47][48]
healing is not as extensive as that on animal models due to The 'vocal cords spelling is also standard in the United
the limited availability of human vocal folds. Vocal fold Kingdom and Australia.
injuries can have a number of causes including chronic
overuse, chemical, thermal and mechanical trauma such
as smoking, laryngeal cancer, and surgery. Other benign 16.5 See also
pathological phenomena like polyps, vocal fold nodules
and edema will also introduce disordered phonation.[37] This article uses anatomical terminology; for an
Any injury to human vocal folds elicits a wound healing overview, see Anatomical terminology.
process characterized by disorganized collagen deposi-
tion and, eventually, formation of scar tissue.[38][39][40][41]
Verdolini[42] and her group sought to detect and describe Adams apple
acute tissue response of injured rabbit VF model. They Electroglottograph
quantied the expression of two biochemical markers:
interleukin 1 and prostaglandin E2, which are associated Falsetto
with acute wound healing. They found the secretions of Vocal cord dysfunction
these inammatory mediators were signicantly elevated
when collected from injured VF versus normal VF. This Vocology
result was consistent with their previous study about the Articulatory phonetics
function of IL-1 and PGE-2 in wound healing.[42][43] In-
vestigation about the temporal and magnitude of inam- Laryngospasm
matory response in VFs may benet for elucidating sub-
sequent pathological events in vocal fold wounding,[43]
which is good for clinician to develop therapeutic targets 16.6 Additional images
to minimize scar formation. In the proliferative phase of
VFs wound healing, if the production of HA and colla-
gen is not balanced, which means the HA level is lower
than normal, the brosis of collagen cannot be regulated.
Consequently, regenerative-type wound healing turns to
be the formation of scar.[38][41] Scarring may lead to the
deformity of vocal fold edge, the disruption of LPs vis- Vocal folds.
cosity and stiness.[44] Patients suering from vocal fold
scar complain about increased phonatory eort, vocal fa-
tigue, breathlessness, and dysphonia.[38] Vocal fold scar
is one of the most challenging problems for otolaryngol-
ogists because its hard to be diagnosed at germinal stage
and the function necessity of VF is delicate.

16.4 History Coronal section of larynx and upper

part of trachea.

16.4.1 Etymology

Vocal cords [American spelling] or vocal chords [UK] are

terms commonly used to refer to the vocal folds, or vo-
cal aps. The term was coined by the French anatomist
Antoine Ferrein in 1741. In his violin analogy of the
human voice, he postulated that the moving air acted
like a bow on cordes vocales.[45] The alternative spelling The entrance to the larynx,
in English is 'vocal chords, possibly due to the musical viewed from behind.
connotations or to confusion with the geometrical de-
16.7. REFERENCES
Muscles of the larynx, seen from
above.
16.7 References
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18225701.
[2] Titze, Ingo R. (1994). Principles of Voice Production.
Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-717893-3.
[3] Maton, Anthea; Hopkins, Jean; McLaughlin, Charles
William; Johnson, Susan; Warner, Maryanna Quon; La-
Hart, David; Wright, Jill D. (1993). Human Biology and
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[4] Fuks, Leonardo (1998). From Air to Music: Acoustical,
Physiological and Perceptual Aspects of Reed Wind In-
strument Playing and Vocal-Ventricular Fold Phonation.
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[6] Briggaman RA, Wheeler CE (August 1975). Epidermol-
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PMID 1151111.
[7] Sato K, Hirano M (January 1997). Age-related changes
of elastic bers in the supercial layer of the lamina pro-
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(1): 448. doi:10.1177/000348949710600109. PMID
9006361.
[8] Linda Rammage; M D Morrison; Hamish Nichol, Man-
agement of the voice and its disorders, published by:: Sin-
gular/Thomson Learning, San Diego, CA ,2001, 269-270.
[9] Hammond TH, Zhou R, Hammond EH, Pawlak A, Gray
SD (March 1997). The intermediate layer: a morpho-
logic study of the elastin and hyaluronic acid constituents
of normal human vocal folds. J Voice. 11 (1): 5966.
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[10] Pawlak AS, Hammond T, Hammond E, Gray SD (January
1996). Immunocytochemical study of proteoglycans in
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11. PMID 8546427.
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[11] Hirano, M; Kakita, Y (1985). Cover-body theory of vo-
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2000). Biomechanical and histologic observations of vo-
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[13] Sato K, Hirano M, Nakashima T (January 2002). Age-
related changes of collagenous bers in the human vo-
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11800365.
[14] Sato K, Hirano M, Nakashima T (May 2001). Fine struc-
ture of the human newborn and infant vocal fold mu-
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24. PMID 11372924.
[15] Ward PD, Thibeault SL, Gray SD (September 2002).
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12395982.
[16] Chan RW, Gray SD, Titze IR (June 2001). The im-
portance of hyaluronic acid in vocal fold biomechan-
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doi:10.1067/mhn.2001.115906. PMID 11391249.
[17] Schweinfurth JM, Thibeault SL (September 2008). Does
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borns capacity for crying?". Laryngoscope. 118 (9):
16929. doi:10.1097/MLG.0b013e3181782754. PMID
18596477.
[18] Hahn MS, Teply BA, Stevens MM, Zeitels SM, Langer
R (March 2006). Collagen composite hydrogels for vo-
cal fold lamina propria restoration. Biomaterials. 27 (7):
11049. doi:10.1016/j.biomaterials.2005.07.022. PMID
16154633.
[19] Hirano, M., S. Kurita, and T. Nakashima. Vocal fold
physiology : contemporary research and clinical issues.
in Vocal Fold Physiology, Conference. 1981. San Diego,
Calif.: College-Hill Press.
[20] Hammond TH, Gray SD, Butler J, Zhou R, Hammond
E (October 1998). Age- and gender-related elastin dis-
tribution changes in human vocal folds. Otolaryngol
Head Neck Surg. 119 (4): 31422. doi:10.1016/s0194-
5998(98)70071-3. PMID 9781983.
[21] Sato K, Hirano M (July 1995). Histologic investiga-
tion of the macula ava of the human newborn vocal
fold. Ann. Otol. Rhinol. Laryngol. 104 (7): 55662.
doi:10.1177/000348949510400710. PMID 7598369.
[22] Boseley ME, Hartnick CJ (October 2006). Develop-
ment of the human true vocal fold: depth of cell lay-
ers and quantifying cell types within the lamina pro-
pria. Ann. Otol. Rhinol. Laryngol. 115 (10): 7848.
doi:10.1177/000348940611501012. PMID 17076102.
54
[23] Hartnick CJ, Rehbar R, Prasad V (January 2005). De-
velopment and maturation of the pediatric human vo-
cal fold lamina propria. Laryngoscope. 115 (1): 4
15. doi:10.1097/01.mlg.0000150685.54893.e9. PMID
15630357.
[24] Sato K, Hirano M (February 1995). Histologic inves-
tigation of the macula ava of the human vocal fold.
Ann. Otol. Rhinol. Laryngol. 104 (2): 13843.
doi:10.1177/000348949510400210. PMID 7857016.
[25] Sato K, Nakashima T, Nonaka S, Harabuchi Y (June
2008). Histopathologic investigations of the unphonated
human vocal fold mucosa. Acta Otolaryngol. 128
(6): 694701. doi:10.1080/00016480701675643. PMID
18568507.
[26] Titze IR, Hitchcock RW, Broadhead K, et al. (October
2004). Design and validation of a bioreactor for en-
gineering vocal fold tissues under combined tensile and
vibrational stresses. J Biomech. 37 (10): 15219.
doi:10.1016/j.jbiomech.2004.01.007. PMID 15336927.
[27] Rios OA, Duprat Ade C, Santos AR (2008).
Immunohistochemical searching for estrogen and
progesterone receptors in women vocal fold epithelia.
Braz J Otorhinolaryngol. 74 (4): 48793. PMID
18852972.
[28] Newman SR, Butler J, Hammond EH, Gray SD (March
2000). Preliminary report on hormone receptors in
the human vocal fold. J Voice. 14 (1): 7281.
doi:10.1016/s0892-1997(00)80096-x. PMID 10764118.
[29] Hirano M, Kurita S, Sakaguchi S (1989). Ageing of the
vibratory tissue of human vocal folds. Acta Otolaryngol.
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PMID 2756834.
[30] Nelson, J.F. (1995). The potential role of se-
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[31] Bentley JP, Brenner RM, Linstedt AD, et al. (November
1986). Increased hyaluronate and collagen biosynthesis
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Invest. Dermatol. 87 (5): 66873. doi:10.1111/1523-
1747.ep12456427. PMID 3772161.
[32] Lucero, J.C. (1995). The minimum lung pressure to sus-
tain vocal fold oscillation. Journal of the Acoustical So-
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[33] Titze IR (April 1988). The physics of small-amplitude
oscillation of the vocal folds. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 83 (4):
153652. doi:10.1121/1.395910. PMID 3372869.
[34] George NA, de Mul FF, Qiu Q, Rakhorst G, Schutte HK
(May 2008). Depth-kymography: high-speed calibrated
3D imaging of human vocal fold vibration dynamics.
Phys Med Biol. 53 (10): 266775. doi:10.1088/0031-
9155/53/10/015. PMID 18443389.
[35] Ingo Titze, University of Iowa.
CHAPTER 16. VOCAL FOLDS
[36] Stadelmann WK, Digenis AG, Tobin GR (August 1998).
Physiology and healing dynamics of chronic cutaneous
wounds. Am. J. Surg. 176 (2A Suppl): 26S38S.
doi:10.1016/S0002-9610(98)00183-4. PMID 9777970.
[37] Wallis L, Jackson-Menaldi C, Holland W, Giraldo A
(March 2004). Vocal fold nodule vs. vocal fold
polyp: answer from surgical pathologist and voice pathol-
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doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2003.07.003. PMID 15070232.
[38] Rosen CA (October 2000). Vocal fold scar: evaluation
and treatment. Otolaryngol. Clin. North Am. 33 (5):
10816. PMID 10984771.
[39] Hirano S, Bless DM, Rousseau B, et al. (March 2004).
Prevention of vocal fold scarring by topical injection
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200403000-00030. PMID 15091233.
[40] Peled ZM, Chin GS, Liu W, Galliano R, Longaker MT
(October 2000). Response to tissue injury. Clin Plast
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[41] Longaker MT, Chiu ES, Adzick NS, Stern M, Harri-
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PMC 1358347 . PMID 2009010.
[42] Branski RC, Rosen CA, Verdolini K, Hebda PA (Jan-
uary 2004). Markers of wound healing in vocal
fold secretions from patients with laryngeal pathology.
Ann. Otol. Rhinol. Laryngol. 113 (1): 239.
doi:10.1177/000348940411300105. PMID 14763567.
[43] Branski RC, Rosen CA, Verdolini K, Hebda PA (June
2005). Biochemical markers associated with acute vo-
cal fold wound healing: a rabbit model. J Voice. 19
(2): 2839. doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2004.04.003. PMID
15907442.
[44] Hansen JK, Thibeault SL (March 2006). Current
understanding and review of the literature: vo-
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doi:10.1016/j.jvoice.2004.12.005. PMID 15964741.
[45] Ferrein, Antoine (1741). De la formation de la voix de
l'homme. Mmoires de l' Acadmie Royale (in French).
Paris: Bondot: 409432.
[46] Wilson, Kenneth G. (1993). The Columbia Guide to Stan-
dard American English.
[47] Zimmer, Ben (2007-10-18). Are We Giving Free
Rei(g)n to New Spellings?". OUPblog. Oxford Univer-
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[48] National Dictionary Day. ABC News. 2007-10-16. Re-
trieved 2008-11-13.
16.9. EXTERNAL LINKS 55

16.8 Bibliography
Davids, Julia and Stephen A. LaTour. Vocal Tech-
nique: A Guide for Conductors, Teachers, and
Singers. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2012.

16.9 External links

National Center for Voice and Speechs ocial web-
site
Lewcock, Ronald, et al. Acoustics: The
Voice. In Grove Music Online (by subscription)/
http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/
article/grove/music/00134pg6
Chapter 17

Voice (phonetics)

Voiced redirects here. For the organization, see 17.1 Notation

VOICED. For the related concept, see voicelessness.
The International Phonetic Alphabet has distinct letters
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and for many voiceless and voiced pairs of consonants (the
phonology to characterise speech sounds (usually obstruents), such as [p b], [t d], [k ], [q ]. In addi-
consonants), with sounds described as either voiceless tion, there is a diacritic for voicedness: . Diacritics
(also called unvoiced) or voiced. are typically used with letters for prototypically voiceless
sounds.
The term, however, is used to refer to two separate con-
cepts: In Unicode, the symbols are encoded U+032C
COMBINING CARON BELOW (HTML &#812;) and
U+0325 COMBINING RING BELOW (HTML
Voicing can refer to the articulatory process in which &#805;).
the vocal cords vibrate, its primary use in phonetics The extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet
to describe phones, which are particular speech have a notation for partial voicing and devoicing as well
sounds. as for prevoicing:
Partial voicing can mean light but continuous voicing, dis-
It can also refer to a classication of speech sounds continuous voicing, or discontinuities in the degree of
that tend to be associated with vocal cord vibration voicing. For the example, s could be an [s] with (some)
but may not actually be voiced at the articulatory voicing in the middle and z could be [z] with (some) de-
level. That is the terms primary use in phonology voicing in the middle.
to describe phonemes or in phonetics to describe
Partial voicing can also be indicated in the normal IPA
phones.
with transcriptions like [b i] and [d].[2]

At the articulatory level, a voiced sound is one in which

the vocal cords vibrate, and a voiceless sound is one in 17.2 In English
which they do not.
For example, voicing accounts for the dierence between The distinction between the articulatory use of voice
and the phonological use rests on the distinction be-
the pair of sounds associated with the English letters s
and z. The two sounds are transcribed as [s] and [z] tween phone (represented between square brackets) and
to distinguish them from the English letters, which have phoneme (represented between slashes). The dierence
several possible pronunciations, depending on the con- is best illustrated by a rough example.
text. If one places the ngers on the voice box (i.e. the The English word nods is made up of a sequence of
location of the Adams apple in the upper throat), one can phonemes, represented symbolically as /ndz/, or the se-
feel a vibration while zzzz is pronounced but not with ssss. quence of /n/, //, /d/, and /z/. Each symbol is an abstract
(For a more detailed, technical explanation, see modal representation of a phoneme. That awareness is an inher-
voice and phonation.) In most European languages, with ent part of speakers mental grammar that allows them to
a notable exception being Icelandic, vowels and other recognise words.
sonorants (consonants such as m, n, l, and r) are modally
However, phonemes are not sounds in themselves.
voiced. Rather, phonemes are, in a sense, converted to phones
When used to classify speech sounds, voiced and un- before being spoken. The /z/ phoneme, for instance, can
voiced are merely labels used to group phones and actually be pronounced as either the [s] phone or the
phonemes together for the purposes of classication. [z] phone since /z/ is frequently devoiced, even in u-

56
17.3. DEGREES OF VOICING 57

ent speech, especially at the end of an utterance. The se- 17.3 Degrees of voicing
quence of phones for nods might be transcribed as [nts]
or [ndz], depending on the presence or strength of this There are two variables to degrees of voicing: intensity
devoicing. While the [z] phone has articulatory voicing, (discussed under phonation), and duration (discussed un-
the [s] phone does not have it. der voice onset time). When a sound is described as
What complicates the matter is that for English, conso- half voiced or partially voiced, it is not always clear
nant phonemes are classied as either voiced or voiceless whether that means that the voicing is weak (low inten-
even though it is not the primary distinctive feature be- sity) or if the voicing occurs during only part of the sound
tween them. Still, the classication is used as a stand- (short duration). In the case of English, it is the latter.
in for phonological processes, such as vowel lengthening Juhoansi and some of the neighboring languages are ty-
that occurs before voiced consonants but not before un- pologically unusual in having contrastive partially voiced
voiced consonants or vowel quality changes (the sound of consonants. They have aspirate and ejective consonants,
the vowel) in some dialects of English that occur before which are normally incompatible with voicing, in voice-
unvoiced but not voiced consonants. Such processes al- less and voiced pairs.[3] The consonants start out voiced
low English speakers to continue to perceive dierence but become voiceless partway through, allow normal as-
between voiced and voiceless consonants when the de- piration or ejection. They are [bp , dt, dts, dt, k]
voicing of the former would otherwise make them sound and [dts, dt] and a similar series of clicks.[4]
identical to the latter.
English has four pairs of fricative phonemes that can be
divided into a table by place of articulation and voicing. 17.4 Voice and tenseness
The voiced fricatives can readily be felt to have voicing
throughout the duration of the phone especially when they
occur between vowels. There are languages with two sets of contrasting
obstruents that are labelled /p t k f s x / vs. /b d v
However, in the class of consonants called stops, such as z / even though there is no involvement of voice (or
/p, t, k, b, d, /, the contrast is more complicated for voice onset time) in that contrast. That happens, for in-
English. The voiced sounds do not typically feature stance, in several Alemannic German dialects. Because
articulatory voicing throughout the sound. The dier- voice is not involved, this is explained as a contrast in
ence between the unvoiced stop phonemes and the voiced tenseness, called a fortis and lenis contrast.
stop phonemes is not just a matter of whether articulatory
voicing is present or not. Rather, it includes when voicing There is a hypothesis that the contrast between fortis and
starts (if at all), the presence of aspiration (airow burst lenis consonants is related to the contrast between voice-
following the release of the closure) and the duration of less and voiced consonants. That relation is based on
the closure and aspiration. sound perception as well as on sound production, where
consonant voice, tenseness and length are only dierent
English voiceless stops are generally aspirated at the be- manifestations of a common sound feature.
ginning of a stressed syllable, and in the same con-
text, their voiced counterparts are voiced only partway
through. In more narrow phonetic transcription, the
voiced symbols are maybe used only to represent the pres- 17.5 See also
ence of articulatory voicing, and aspiration is represented
with a superscript h. Dyscravia
When the consonants come at the end of a syllable, how-
List of language disorders
ever, what distinguishes them is quite dierent. Voice-
less phonemes are typically unaspirated, glottalized and Manner of articulation
the closure itself may not even be released, making it
sometimes dicult to hear the dierence between, for Phonation
example, light and like. However, auditory cues remain
to distinguish between voiced and voiceless sounds, such Place of articulation
as what has been described above, like the length of the
preceding vowel. Voice onset time
Other English sounds, the vowels and sonorants, are nor-
mally fully voiced. However, they may be devoiced in
certain positions, especially after aspirated consonants, 17.6 References
as in cofee, tree, and play in which the voicing is delayed
to the extent of missing the sonorant or vowel altogether. [1] The parentheses should appear under the letter, but that is
not fully supported by Unicode. As of version 8.0, only
central voicing and devoicing, [s ] and [z ], is encoded.
58 CHAPTER 17. VOICE (PHONETICS)

[2] Kretzschmar (1993) Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of

the Middle and South Atlantic States, University of Chicago
Press, p. 122.

[3] Consonants that are called voiced aspirate normally

have breathy voice, not voiceless aspiration, as in
Juhoansi, Taa and similar languages.

[4] Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of

the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 63, 8081.
ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
Chapter 18
Voice-onset time
In phonetics, voice-onset time (VOT) is a feature of the
production of stop consonants. It is dened as the length
of time that passes between the release of a stop conso-
nant 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 conso-
nant and continues in the release, for those unaspirated
voiced stops in which there is no voicing present at the
instant of articulatory closure.
voiced plosive
closure blockage release
voiceless unaspirated plosive
closure blockage release
voiceless aspirated plosive
closure blockage release
A graphical representation of the VOT of voiced, tenuis, and as-
pirated stops
18.1 History
The concept of voice-onset time can be traced back as
far as in the 19th century, when Adjarian (1899: 119)[1] Three major phonation types of stops can be analyzed in
studied the Armenian stops, and characterized them by terms of their voice-onset time.
the relation qui existe entre deux moments : celui o la
consonne clate par l'eet de l'expulsion de l'air hors de la Simple unaspirated voiceless stops, sometimes
bouche, ou explosion, et celui o le larynx entre en vibra-
tion (relation that exists between two moments: the one
when the consonant bursts when the air is released out of
the mouth, or explosion, and the one when larynx starts
vibrating). However, the concept will become popular
only in the 1960s, in a context described by Lin & Wang
(2011: 514):[2] At that time, there was an ongoing de-
bate about which phonetic attribute would allow voiced
and voiceless stops to be eectively distinguished. For
instance, voicing, aspiration, and articulatory force were
some of the attributes being studied regularly. In English,
voicing can successfully separate /b, d, / from /p, t, k/
when stops are at word-medial positions, but this is not al-
ways true for word-initial stops. Strictly speaking, word-
initial voiced stops /b, d, / are only partially voiced, and
sometimes are even voiceless. The concept of VOT will
nally acquire its name in the famous study of Lisker &
Abramson (1964).[3]
18.2 Analytic problems
A number of problems arose in dening VOT in some
languages, and there is a call for reconsidering whether
this speech synthesis parameter should be used to replace
articulatory or aerodynamic model parameters which do
not have these problems, and which have a stronger ex-
planatory signicance.[4] As in the discussion below, any
explication of VOT variations will invariably lead back to
such aerodynamic and articulatory concepts, and there is
no reason presented why VOT adds to an analysis, other
than that, as an acoustic parameter, it may sometimes be
easier to measure than an aerodynamic parameter (pres-
sure or airow) or an articulatory parameter (closure in-
terval or the duration, extent and timing of a vocal fold
abductory gesture).
18.3 Types
called "tenuis" stops, have a voice-onset time at or
near zero, meaning that the voicing of a following
sonorant (such as a vowel) begins at or near to when
the stop is released. (An oset of 15 ms or less on
[t] and 30 ms or less on [k] is inaudible, and counts
as tenuis.)
59
60
Voice-Onset Timing spectrograms for English die and tie. The
voiceless gap between release and voicing is highlighted in red.
Here the phoneme /t/ has a VOT of 95 ms., and /d/ has one of
25 ms.
Aspirated stops followed by a sonorant have a voice-
onset time greater than this amount, called a posi-
tive VOT. The length of the VOT in such cases is
a practical measure of aspiration: The longer the
VOT, the stronger the aspiration. In Navajo, for
example, which is strongly aspirated, the aspiration
(and therefore the VOT) lasts twice as long as it does
in English: 160ms vs. 80ms for [k], and 45ms for
[k]. Some languages have weaker aspiration than
English. For velar stops, tenuis [k] typically has a
VOT of 20-30 ms, weakly aspirated [k] of some
50-60 ms, moderately aspirated [k] averages 80
90 ms, and anything much over 100 ms would be
considered strong aspiration. (Another phonation,
breathy voice, is commonly called voiced aspiration;
in order for the VOT measure to apply to it, VOT
needs to be understood as the onset of modal voic-
ing. Of course, an aspirated consonant will not al-
ways be followed by a voiced sound, in which case
VOT cannot be used to measure it.)
Voiced stops have a voice-onset time noticeably
less than zero, a negative VOT, meaning the vo-
cal cords start vibrating before the stop is released.
With a fully voiced stop, the VOT coincides with
the onset of the stop; with a partially voiced stop,
such as English [b, d, ] in initial position, voicing
begins sometime during the closure (occlusion) of
CHAPTER 18. VOICE-ONSET TIME
the consonant.
Because neither aspiration nor voicing is absolute, with
intermediate degrees of both, the relative terms fortis and
lenis are often used to describe a binary opposition be-
tween a series of consonants with higher (more positive)
VOT, dened as fortis, and a second series with lower
(more negative) VOT, dened as lenis. Of course, being
relative, what fortis and lenis mean in one language will
not in general correspond to what they mean in another.
Voicing contrast applies to all types of consonants, but as-
piration is generally only a feature of stops and aricates.
18.4 Transcription
Aspiration may be transcribed , long (strong) aspira-
tion . Voicing is most commonly indicated by the
choice of consonant letter. For one way of transcribing
pre-voicing and other timing variants, see extensions to
the IPA#Diacritics. Other systems include that of Laver
(1994),[5] who distinguishes fully devoiced b a and ab
from initial partial devoicing of the onset of a syllable by
ba and from nal partial devoicing of the coda of a syl-
lable by ab.
18.5 Examples in languages
18.6 References
Taehong Cho and Peter Ladefoged, Variations and
universals in VOT: Evidence from 18 languages.
Journal of Phonetics vol. 27. 207-229. 1999.
Angelika Braun, VOT im 19. Jahrhundert oder
Die Wiederkehr des Gleichen"". Phonetica vol. 40.
323-327. 1983.
[1] ADJARIAN, H., Les explosives de l'ancien armnien
tudies dans les dialectes modernes, La Parole. Revue
internationale de Rhinologie, Otologie, Laryngologie et
Phontique exprimentale, 119-127 (1899)
[2] LIN, C. & WANG, H., Automatic estimation of voice-
onset time for word-initial stops by applying random forest
to onset detection, The Journal of the Acoustical Society
of America, 514-525 (2011)
[3] LISKER, L. and ABRAMSON, A.S., A cross-language
study of voicing in initial stops: acoustical measurements,
Word Vol. 20, 384-422 (1964).
[4] ROTHENBERG, M. Voice-Onset Time vs. Articulatory
Modeling for Stop Consonants, The Jan Gaun Memo-
rial Symposium, October 16, 2008. Royal Institute of
Technology, Stockholm. (To be published in the proceed-
ings)
[5] Principles of Phonetics, p. 340
18.7. EXTERNAL LINKS 61

18.7 External links

Buy a pie for the spy A description of the mecha-
nism of voiced, tenuis (voiceless unaspirated), and
(voiceless) aspirated stops in relation to voice-onset
time
Chapter 19

Vowel

In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, dieson and Emmory (1985) demonstrated from a range of
with two competing denitions. In the more common languages that semivowels are produced with a narrower
phonetic denition, a vowel is a sound pronounced with constriction of the vocal tract than vowels, and so may be
an open vocal tract, so that the tongue does not touch considered consonants on that basis.[4] Nonetheless, the
the lips, teeth, or roof of the mouth, such as the English phonetic and phonemic denitions would still conict for
ah // or oh /o/. There is no build-up of air pres- the syllabic el in table, or the syllabic nasals in button and
sure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with rhythm.
consonants, such as the English sh [], which have
a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal
tract. In the other, phonological denition, a vowel is de-
ned as syllabic, the sound that forms the peak of a sylla-
19.2 Articulation
ble. A phonetically equivalent but non-syllabic sound is a
semivowel.
In oral languages, phonetic vowels normally form
the peak (nucleus) of many to all syllables, whereas
consonants form the onset and (in languages that have
them) coda. Some languages allow other sounds to form
the nucleus of a syllable, such as the syllabic (i.e., vocalic)
l in the English word table [teb.l] (when not considered
to have a weak vowel sound: [teb.l]) or the syllabic r
in the Serbo-Croatian word vrt [vrt] garden.
The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis,
meaning vocal (relating to voice).[1] In English, the
word vowel is commonly used to mean both vowel sounds
and the written symbols that represent them.

19.1 Denition
The phonetic denition of vowel (a sound produced
with no constriction in the vocal tract) does not always
match the phonological denition (a sound that forms the
peak of a syllable).[2] The approximants [j] and [w] il-
lustrate this: both are produced without much of a con-
striction in the vocal tract (so phonetically they seem to
be vowel-like), but they occur at the onset of syllables
(e.g. in yet and wet) (which suggests that phono-
logically they are consonants). A similar debate arises
over whether a word like bird in a rhotic dialect has an r-
colored vowel // or a syllabic consonant //. The Amer-
ican linguist Kenneth Pike (1943) suggested the terms
"vocoid" for a phonetic vowel and vowel for a phono-
logical vowel,[3] so using this terminology, [j] and [w]
are classied as vocoids but not vowels. However, Mad-
X-rays of Daniel Jones [i, u, a, ].
The traditional view of vowel production, reected for
example in the terminology and presentation of the
International Phonetic Alphabet, is one of articulatory
features that determine a vowels quality as distinguishing
it from other vowels. Daniel Jones developed the cardinal
vowel system to describe vowels in terms of the features
of tongue height (vertical dimension), tongue backness
(horizontal dimension) and roundedness (lip articulation).
These three parameters are indicated in the schematic
quadrilateral IPA vowel diagram on the right. There are
additional features of vowel quality, such as the velum po-
sition (nasality), type of vocal fold vibration (phonation),
and tongue root position.

62
19.2. ARTICULATION 63

quency of the rst formant, the lower (more open) the

vowel.[7]
The International Phonetic Alphabet denes seven de-
grees of vowel height:

close (high)

near-close (near-high)

close-mid (high-mid)

mid (true-mid)

open-mid (low-mid)
The original vowel quadrilateral, from Jones articulation. The near-open (near-low)
vowel trapezoid of the modern IPA, and at the top of this arti-
cle, is a simplied rendition of this diagram. The bullets are the open (low)
cardinal vowel points. (A parallel diagram covers the front and
central rounded and back unrounded vowels.) The cells indicate
the ranges of articulation that could reasonably be transcribed The letters [e, , , o] are typically used for either close-
with those cardinal vowel letters, [i, e, , a, , , o, u, ], and mid or true-mid vowels. However, if more precision is
non-cardinal []. If a language distinguishes fewer than these required, true-mid vowels may be written with a lower-
vowel qualities, [e, ] could be merged to [e], [o, ] to [o], [a, ing diacritic [e, , , o ]. The Kensiu language, spoken
] to [a], etc. If a language distinguishes more, [] could be in Malaysia and Thailand, is highly unusual in that it con-
added where the ranges of [i, e, , ] intersect, [] where [u, o, trasts true-mid with close-mid and open-mid vowels with-
, ] intersect, and [] where [, , a, , ] intersect. out dierences in other parameters such as backness or
roundness.
This conception of vowel articulation has been known to Although English contrasts six heights in its vowels, they
be inaccurate since 1928. Peter Ladefoged has said that are interdependent with dierences in backness, and
early phoneticians... thought they were describing the many are parts of diphthongs. It appears that some va-
highest point of the tongue, but they were not. They were rieties of German have ve contrasting vowel heights in-
actually describing formant frequencies.[5] (See below.) dependently of length or other parameters. The Bavarian
The IPA Handbook concedes that the vowel quadrilat- dialect of Amstetten has thirteen long vowels, reported
eral must be regarded as an abstraction and not a direct to distinguish ve heights (close, close-mid, mid, open-
mapping of tongue position.[6] mid and open) each among the front unrounded, front
rounded, and back rounded vowels, plus an open central
Nonetheless, the concept that vowel qualities are deter- vowel, thus ve vowel heights on the whole: /i e /, /y
mined primarily by tongue position and lip rounding con- /, /u o /, //. Otherwise, languages are not known
tinues to be used in pedagogy, as it provides an intuitive to contrast more than four degrees of vowel height.
explanation of how vowels are distinguished.
The parameter of vowel height appears to be the primary
cross-linguistic feature of vowels in that all spoken lan-
guages use height as a contrastive feature. No other pa-
19.2.1 Height
rameter, even backness or rounding (see below), is used
in all languages. Some languages have vertical vowel sys-
Main article: Raising (phonetics)
tems in which at least at a phonemic level, only height is
used to distinguish vowels.
Vowel height is named for the vertical position of the
tongue relative to either the roof of the mouth or the
aperture of the jaw. However, it actually refers to the 19.2.2 Backness
rst formant (lowest resonance of the voice), abbreviated
F1, which is associated with the height of the tongue. In Vowel backness is named for the position of the tongue
close /klos/ vowels, also known as high vowels, such as during the articulation of a vowel relative to the back of
[i] and [u], the rst formant is consistent with the tongue the mouth. As with vowel height, however, it is dened
being positioned close to the palate, high in the mouth, by a formant of the voice, in this case the second, F2, not
whereas in open vowels, also known as low vowels, such by the position of the tongue. In front vowels, such as
as [a], F1 is consistent with the jaw being open and the [i], the frequency of F2 is relatively high, which generally
tongue being positioned low in the mouth. Height is de- corresponds to a position of the tongue forward in the
ned by the inverse of the F1 value: The higher the fre- mouth, whereas in back vowels, such as [u], F2 is low,
64 CHAPTER 19. VOWEL

i
e

Front, raised and retracted are the three articulatory dimensions

of vowel space

a ([u, o, , etc.), and retracted vowels, where the root of the

tongue approaches the pharynx ([, ], etc.):

Idealistic tongue positions of cardinal front vowels with highest front

point indicated.
raised

consistent with the tongue being positioned towards the retracted

back of the mouth.
The International Phonetic Alphabet denes ve degrees Membership in these categories is scalar, with[8]the mid-
of vowel backness: central vowels being marginal to any category.

front 19.2.4 Roundedness

near-front
Main article: Roundedness
central
near-back Roundedness is named after the rounding of the lips in
some vowels. Because lip rounding is easily visible, vow-
back els may be commonly identied as rounded based on the
articulation of the lips. Acoustically, rounded vowels are
To them may be added front-central and back-central, identied chiey by a decrease in F2, although F1 is also
corresponding to the vertical lines separating central from slightly decreased.
front and back vowel spaces in several IPA diagrams. In most languages, roundedness is a reinforcing feature
Although English has vowels at ve degrees of backness, of mid to high back vowels rather than a distinctive fea-
there is no known language that distinguishes ve degrees ture. Usually, the higher a back vowel, the more intense
of backness without additional dierences in height or is the rounding. However, in some languages, rounded-
rounding. ness is independent from backness, such as French and
German (with front rounded vowels), most Uralic lan-
guages (Estonian has a rounding contrast for /o/ and front
19.2.3 Front, raised and retracted vowels), Turkic languages (with a rounding distinction
for front vowels and /u/), and Vietnamese with back un-
The conception of the tongue moving in two directions, rounded vowels.
highlow and frontback, is not supported by articula-
tory evidence and does not clarify how articulation aects Nonetheless, even in those languages there is usually
vowel quality. Vowels may instead be characterized by some phonetic correlation between rounding and back-
the three directions of movement of the tongue from its ness: front rounded vowels tend to be more front-central
neutral position: front, raised, and retracted. Front vow- than front, and back unrounded vowels tend to be more
els ([i, e, ] and, to a lesser extent [a, , , ], etc.), can be back-central than back. Thus, the placement of un-
secondarily qualied as close or open, as in the traditional rounded vowels to the left of rounded vowels on the IPA
conception, but rather than there being a unitary cate- vowel chart is reective of their position in formant space.
gory of back vowels, the regrouping posits raised vow- Dierent kinds of labialization are possible. In mid to
els, where the body of the tongue approaches the velum high rounded back vowels the lips are generally pro-
19.2. ARTICULATION
truded (pursed) outward, a phenomenon known as ex-
olabial rounding because the insides of the lips are visi-
ble, whereas in mid to high rounded front vowels the lips
are generally compressed with the margins of the lips
pulled in and drawn towards each other, a phenomenon
known as endolabial rounding. However, not all lan-
guages follow that pattern. Japanese /u/, for example,
is an endolabial (compressed) back vowel, and sounds
quite dierent from an English exolabial /u/. Swedish and
Norwegian are the only two known languages in which the
feature is contrastive; they have both endo- and exo-labial
close front vowels and close central vowels, respectively.
In many phonetic treatments, both are considered types
of rounding, but some phoneticians do not believe that
these are subsets of a single phenomenon and posit in-
stead three independent features of rounded (exolabial),
compressed (endolabial) and spread (unrounded). Others
distinguish compressed rounded vowels, in which the cor-
ners of the mouth are drawn together, from compressed
unrounded vowels, in which the lips are compressed but
the corners remain apart as in spread vowels.
19.2.5 Nasalization
Main articles: Nasal vowel and Nasalization
Nasalization refers to whether some of the air escapes
through the nose. In nasal vowels, the velum is lowered,
and some air travels through the nasal cavity as well as
the mouth. An oral vowel is a vowel in which all air es-
capes through the mouth. French, Polish and Portuguese
contrast nasal and oral vowels.
19.2.6 Phonation
Main article: Phonation
Voicing describes whether the vocal cords are vibrating Rhotic vowels are the R-colored vowels of American
during the articulation of a vowel. Most languages have English and a few other languages.
only voiced vowels, but several Native American lan-
guages, such as Cheyenne and Totonac, contrast voiced
and devoiced vowels. Vowels are devoiced in whispered 19.2.9 Tenseness/checked vowels versus
speech. In Japanese and in Quebec French, vowels that
are between voiceless consonants are often devoiced.
Modal voice, creaky voice, and breathy voice (murmured
vowels) are phonation types that are used contrastively in
some languages. Often, they co-occur with tone or stress
distinctions; in the Mon language, vowels pronounced in
the high tone are also produced with creaky voice. In
such cases, it can be unclear whether it is the tone, the
voicing type, or the pairing of the two that is being used
for phonemic contrast. The combination of phonetic cues
(phonation, tone, stress) is known as register or register
complex.
65
19.2.7 Tongue root retraction
Main article: Advanced and retracted tongue root
Advanced tongue root (ATR) is a feature common across
much of Africa, the Pacic Northwest, and scattered
other languages such as Modern Mongolian. The con-
trast between advanced and retracted tongue root resem-
bles the tense/lax contrast acoustically, but they are artic-
ulated dierently. Those vowels involve noticeable ten-
sion in the vocal tract.
19.2.8 Secondary narrowings in the vocal
tract
Main article: Pharyngealization
Pharyngealized vowels occur in some languages like
Sedang and the Tungusic languages. Pharyngealisation
is similar in articulation to retracted tongue root but is
acoustically distinct.
A stronger degree of pharyngealisation occurs in the
Northeast Caucasian languages and the Khoisan lan-
guages. They might be called epiglottalized since the
primary constriction is at the tip of the epiglottis.
The greatest degree of pharyngealisation is found in the
strident vowels of the Khoisan languages, where the
larynx is raised, and the pharynx constricted, so that ei-
ther the epiglottis or the arytenoid cartilages vibrate in-
stead of the vocal cords.
Note that the terms pharyngealized, epiglottalized, stri-
dent, and sphincteric are sometimes used interchangeably.
Rhotic vowels
Main article: R-colored vowel
free vowels
Main article: Tenseness
Tenseness is used to describe the opposition of tense vow-
els as in leap, suit vs. lax vowels as in lip, soot. This
opposition has traditionally been thought to be a result
of greater muscular tension, though phonetic experiments
have repeatedly failed to show this.
Unlike the other features of vowel quality, tenseness is
only applicable to the few languages that have this opposi-
66 CHAPTER 19. VOWEL

tion (mainly Germanic languages, e.g. English), whereas

the vowels of the other languages (e.g. Spanish) cannot
be described with respect to tenseness in any meaningful
way. In discourse about the English language, tense and
lax are often used interchangeably with long and short,
respectively, because the features are concomitant in the
common varieties of English. This cannot be applied to
all English dialects or other languages.
In most Germanic languages, lax vowels can only occur
in closed syllables. Therefore, they are also known as
checked vowels, whereas the tense vowels are called free
vowels since they can occur in any kind of syllable.

19.3 Acoustics
An idealized schematic of vowel space, based on the formants
of Daniel Jones and John Wells pronouncing the cardinal vow-
Related article: Phonetics els of the IPA. The scale is logarithmic. The grey range is where
The acoustics of vowels are fairly well understood. The F2 would be less than F1, which by denition is impossible. [a]
is an extra-low central vowel. Phonemically it may be front or
back, depending on the language. Rounded vowels that are front
in tongue position are front-central in formant space, while un-
rounded vowels that are back in articulation are back-central in
formant space. Thus [y ] have perhaps similar F1 and F2 val-
ues to the high central vowels [ ]; similarly [ ] vs central [
] and [ ] vs central [ ].

Spectrogram of vowels [i, u, ]. [] is a low vowel, so its F1

value is higher than that of [i] and [u], which are high vowels.
[i] is a front vowel, so its F2 is substantially higher than that of
[u] and [], which are back vowels.

dierent vowel qualities are realized in acoustic analyses

of vowels by the relative values of the formants, acoustic
resonances of the vocal tract which show up as dark bands
on a spectrogram. The vocal tract acts as a resonant cav-
ity, and the position of the jaw, lips, and tongue aect
the parameters of the resonant cavity, resulting in dif- The same chart, with a few intermediate vowels. Low front
[] is intermediate between [a] and [], while [] is interme-
ferent formant values. The acoustics of vowels can be
diate between [] and []. The back vowels change gradually in
visualized using spectrograms, which display the acous-
rounding, from unrounded [] and slightly rounded [] to tightly
tic energy at each frequency, and how this changes with rounded [u]; similarly slightly rounded [] to tightly rounded
time. [y]. With [a] seen as an (extra-)low central vowel, the vowels
The rst formant, abbreviated F1, corresponds to vowel [ ] can be redened as front, central and back (near-)low
openness (vowel height). Open vowels have high F1 fre- vowels.
quencies, while close vowels have low F1 frequencies, as
can be seen in the accompanying spectrogram: The [i] trogram, where the front vowel [i] has a much higher F2
and [u] have similar low rst formants, whereas [] has a frequency than the other two vowels. However, in open
higher formant. vowels, the high F1 frequency forces a rise in the F2 fre-
The second formant, F2, corresponds to vowel frontness. quency as well, so an alternative measure of frontness is
Back vowels have low F2 frequencies, while front vowels the dierence between the rst and second formants. For
have high F2 frequencies. This is very clear in the spec- this reason, some people prefer to plot as F1 vs. F2
19.5. MONOPHTHONGS, DIPHTHONGS, TRIPHTHONGS 67

F1. (This dimension is usually called 'backness rather short, half-long, and long vowels, and this has been re-
than 'frontness, but the term 'backness can be counter- ported for a few other languages, though not always as a
intuitive when discussing formants.) phonemic distinction. Long vowels are written in the IPA
In the third edition of his textbook, Peter Ladefoged rec- with a triangular colon, which has two equilateral trian-
ommended using plots of F1 against F2 F1 to rep- gles pointing at each other in place of dots ([i]). The IPA
resent vowel quality.[9] However, in the fourth edition, symbol for half-long vowels is the top half of this ([i]).
he changed to adopt a simple plot of F1 against F2,[10] Longer vowels are sometimes claimed, but these are al-
and this simple plot of F1 against F2 was maintained ways divided between two syllables.
for the fth (and nal) edition of the book.[11] Katrina The length of the vowel is a grammatical abstraction,
Hayward compares the two types of plots and concludes and there may be more phonologically distinctive lengths.
that plotting of F1 against F2 F1 is not very satisfac- For example, in Finnish, there are ve dierent physi-
tory because of its eect on the placing of the central cal lengths, because stress is marked with length on both
vowels,[12] so she also recommends use of a simple plot grammatically long and short vowels. However, Finnish
of F1 against F2. In fact, this kind of plot of F1 against stress is not lexical and is always on the rst two moras,
F2 has been used by analysts to show the quality of the thus this variation serves to separate words from each
vowels in a wide range of languages, including RP,[13][14] other.
the Queens English,[15] American English,[16] Singa- In non-tonal languages, like English, intonation encom-
pore English,[17] Brunei English,[18] North Frisian,[19] passes lexical stress. A stressed syllable will typically be
Turkish Kabardian,[20] and various indigenous Australian pronounced with a higher pitch, intensity, and length than
languages.[21] unstressed syllables. For example, in the word intensity,
R-colored vowels are characterized by lowered F3 values. the vowel represented by the letter e is stressed, so it is
longer and pronounced with a higher pitch and intensity
Rounding is generally realized by a decrease of F2 that
tends to reinforce vowel backness. One eect of this than the other vowels.
is that back vowels are most commonly rounded while
front vowels are most commonly unrounded; another is
that rounded vowels tend to plot to the right of unrounded 19.5 Monophthongs, diphthongs,
vowels in vowel charts. That is, there is a reason for plot-
ting vowel pairs the way they are. triphthongs
Main articles: Monophthong, Diphthong, Triphthong,
and Semivowel
19.4 Prosody and intonation
A vowel sound whose quality does not change over the
Main articles: Prosody and Intonation duration of the vowel is called a monophthong. Monoph-
thongs are sometimes called pure or stable vowels.
The features of vowel prosody are often described inde- A vowel sound that glides from one quality to another is
pendently from vowel quality. In non-linear phonetics, called a diphthong, and a vowel sound that glides succes-
they are located on parallel layers. The features of vowel sively through three qualities is a triphthong.
prosody are usually considered not to apply to the vowel All languages have monophthongs and many languages
itself, but to the syllable, as some languages do not con-
have diphthongs, but triphthongs or vowel sounds with
trast vowel length separately from syllable length. even more target qualities are relatively rare cross-
Intonation encompasses the changes in pitch, intensity, linguistically. English has all three types: the vowel sound
and speed of an utterance over time. In tonal languages, in hit is a monophthong //, the vowel sound in boy is in
in most cases the tone of a syllable is carried by the vowel, most dialects a diphthong //, and the vowel sounds of
meaning that the relative pitch or the pitch contour that ower, /ar/, form a triphthong or disyllable, depending
marks the tone is superimposed on the vowel. If a syllable on dialect.
has a high tone, for example, the pitch of the vowel will In phonology, diphthongs and triphthongs are distin-
be high. If the syllable has a falling tone, then the pitch guished from sequences of monophthongs by whether the
of the vowel will fall from high to low over the course of vowel sound may be analyzed into dierent phonemes
uttering the vowel. or not. For example, the vowel sounds in a two-syllable
Length or quantity refers to the abstracted duration of pronunciation of the word ower (/ar/) phonetically
the vowel. In some analyses this feature is described form a disyllabic triphthong, but are phonologically a se-
as a feature of the vowel quality, not of the prosody. quence of a diphthong (represented by the letters ow)
Japanese, Finnish, Hungarian, Arabic and Latin have a and a monophthong (represented by the letters er).
two-way phonemic contrast between short and long vow- Some linguists use the terms diphthong and triphthong
els. The Mixe language has a three-way contrast among only in this phonemic sense.
68
19.6 Written vowels
Main article: Writing system
The name vowel is often used for the symbols that rep-
resent vowel sounds in a languages writing system, par-
ticularly if the language uses an alphabet. In writing sys-
tems based on the Latin alphabet, the letters A, E, I, O,
U, Y and sometimes others can all be used to represent
vowels. However, not all of these letters represent vow-
els in all languages, or even consistently within one lan-
guage (some of them, especially W and Y, are also used
to represent approximants). Moreover, a vowel might be
represented by a letter usually reserved for consonants,
or a combination of letters, particularly where one letter
represents several sounds at once, or vice versa; exam-
ples from English include igh in thigh and x in x-ray. The dierences in pronunciation of vowel letters between
In addition, extensions of the Latin alphabet have such
independent vowel letters as , , , , , and . by the Great Vowel Shift. After printing was introduced
The phonetic values vary considerably by language, and
some languages use I and Y for the consonant [j], e.g.,
initial I in Italian or Romanian and initial Y in English.
In the original Latin alphabet, there was no written dis-
tinction between V and U, and the letter represented the
approximant [w] and the vowels [u] and []. In Modern
Welsh, the letter W represents these same sounds. Sim-
ilarly, in Creek, the letter V stands for []. There is not
necessarily a direct one-to-one correspondence between
the vowel sounds of a language and the vowel letters.
Many languages that use a form of the Latin alphabet have
more vowel sounds than can be represented by the stan-
dard set of ve vowel letters. In English spelling, the ve
letters A E I O and U can represent a variety of vowel
sounds, while the letter Y frequently represents vowels
(as in e.g., gym, happy", or the diphthongs in cry",
thyme);[22] W is used in representing some diphthongs
(as in cow") and to represent a monophthong in the bor-
rowed words "cwm" and "crwth" (sometimes cruth).
Other languages cope with the limitation in the number of
Latin vowel letters in similar ways. Many languages make
extensive use of combinations of letters to represent vari-
ous sounds. Other languages use vowel letters with mod-
ications, such as in Swedish, or add diacritical marks,
like umlauts, to vowels to represent the variety of possi-
ble vowel sounds. Some languages have also constructed
additional vowel letters by modifying the standard Latin
vowels in other ways, such as or that are found in
some of the Scandinavian languages. The International
Phonetic Alphabet has a set of 28 symbols to represent
the range of basic vowel qualities, and a further set of
diacritics to denote variations from the basic vowel.
The writing systems used for some languages, such as the
Hebrew alphabet and the Arabic alphabet, do not ordi-
narily mark all the vowels, since they are frequently un-
necessary in identifying a word. Technically, these are
called abjads rather than alphabets. Although it is possi-
CHAPTER 19. VOWEL
ble to construct simple English sentences that can be un-
derstood without written vowels (cn y rd ths?), extended
passages of English lacking written vowels can be di-
cult to understand; consider dd, which could be any of
dad, dada, dado, dead, deed, did, died, diode, dodo, dud,
dude, odd, add, or aided. (But note that abjads gen-
erally express some word-internal vowels and all word-
initial and word-nal vowels, whereby the ambiguity will
be much reduced.) The Masoretes devised a vowel nota-
tion system for Hebrew Jewish scripture that is still widely
used, as well as the trope symbols used for its cantillation;
both are part of oral tradition and still the basis for many
bible translationsJewish and Christian.
19.6.1 Shifts
English and its related languages can be accounted for
to England, and therefore after spelling was more or less
standardized, a series of dramatic changes in the pronun-
ciation of the vowel phonemes did occur, and continued
into recent centuries, but were not reected in the spelling
system. This has led to numerous inconsistencies in the
spelling of English vowel sounds and the pronunciation
of English vowel letters (and to the mispronunciation of
foreign words and names by speakers of English).
The existence of vowel shifts should serve as a caution
ag to anyone who is trying to pronounce an ancient lan-
guage or, indeed, any poetry (in any language) from two
centuries ago or earlier.
19.7 Audio samples
19.8 Systems
The importance of vowels in distinguishing one word
from another varies from language to language. Nearly
all languages have at least three phonemic vowels, usu-
ally /i/, /a/, /u/ as in Classical Arabic and Inuktitut (or //,
//, // as in Quechua), though Adyghe and many Sepik
languages have a vertical vowel system of //, //, /a/.
Very few languages have fewer, though some Arrernte,
Circassian, Ndu languages have been argued to have just
two, // and /a/, with [] being epenthetic.
The rarest vowels cataloged are // (has just been cat-
aloged in Paic and a few dialects of English, such as
Received Pronunciation and Great Lakes) and // (Early
Modern English and Russian).
It is not straightforward to say which language has the
most vowels, since that depends on how they are counted.
For example, long vowels, nasal vowels, and various
phonations may or may not be counted separately; in-
deed, it may sometimes be unclear if phonation belongs
19.8. SYSTEMS
to the vowels or the consonants of a language. If such
things are ignored and only vowels with dedicated IPA
letters ('vowel qualities) are considered, then very few
languages have more than ten. The Germanic languages
have some of the largest inventories: Standard Danish has
15 short vowels (/ a e i o u y /), while
the Amstetten dialect of Bavarian has been reported to
have thirteen long vowels: /i y e a guages, onomatopoeiae stand outside the normal phono-
o u/. The situation can be quite disparate within a same
family language: Spanish and French are two closely re-
lated Romance languages but Spanish has only ve vowel
qualities, /a, e, i, o, u/, while classical French has eleven:
/a, , e, , i, o, , u, y, , /. The MonKhmer languages
of Southeast Asia also have some large inventories, such
as the eleven vowels of Vietnamese: /i e a o
u/. Wu dialects have the largest inventories of Chi-
nese; the Jinhui dialect of Wu has also been reported to
have eleven vowels: ten basic vowels, /i y e o u
/, plus restricted //; this does not count the seven nasal
vowels.[23]
One of the most common vowels is [a]; it is nearly univer-
sal for a language to have at least one open vowel, though
most dialects of English have an [] and a []and of-
ten an [], all open vowelsbut no central [a]. Some
Tagalog and Cebuano speakers have [] rather than [a],
and Dhangu Yolngu is described as having / /, with-
out any peripheral vowels. [i] is also extremely common,
though Tehuelche has just the vowels /e a o/ with no close
vowels. The third vowel of Arabic-type three-vowel sys-
tem, /u/, is considerably less common. A large fraction of
the languages of North America happen to have a four-
vowel system without /u/: /i, e, a, o/; Aztec is an example.
In most languages, vowels serve mainly to distinguish sep-
arate lexemes, rather than dierent inectional forms of
the same lexeme as they commonly do in the Semitic lan-
guages. For example, while English man becomes men in
the plural, moon is not a dierent form of the same word.
19.8.1 Words without vowels
See also: English words without vowels
In rhotic dialects of English, as in Canada and the United
States, there are many words such as bird, learn, girl,
church, worst, wyrm, myrrh that some phoneticians an-
alyze as having no vowels, only a syllabic consonant //.
However, others analyze these words instead as having a
rhotic vowel, //. The dierence may be partially one of
dialect.
There are a few such words that are disyllabic, like cursor,
curtain, and turtle: [ks], [ktn] and [ttl] (or [ks],
[ktn], and [ttl]), and even a few that are trisyl-
labic, at least in some accents, such as purpler [p.pl.],
hurdler [h.dl.], gurgler [.l.], certainer [s.tn.], o and /tfktstt/ you gave it. Some words may contain
and Ur-turtle [.t.tl].
69
The word and frequently contracts to a simple nasal n, as
in lock 'n key [lk ki]. Words such as will, have, and
is regularly contract to ll [l], ve [v], and 's [z]. However,
none of them are pronounced alone without vowels, so
they are not phonological words. Onomatopoeic words
that can be pronounced alone, and that have no vowels or
ars, include hmm, pst!, shh!, tsk!, and zzz. As in other lan-
tactics of English.
There are other languages that form lexical words without
vowel sounds. In Serbo-Croatian, for example, the conso-
nants [r] and [r] (the dierence is not written) can act as
a syllable nucleus and carry rising or falling tone; exam-
ples include the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba mrda and
geographic names such as Krk. In Czech, and Slovak, ei-
ther [l] or [r] can stand in for vowels: vlk [vlk] wolf, krk
[krk] neck. A particularly long word without vowels is
tvrthrst, meaning quarter-handful, with two syllables
(one for each R). Whole sentences can be made from such
words, such as Str prst skrz krk, meaning stick a nger
through your neck (follow the link for a sound le), and
Smr pln skvrn zvlhl z mlh A morel full of spots wetted
from fogs. (Here zvlhl has two syllables based on L; note
that the preposition z consists of a single consonant. Only
prepositions do this in Czech, and they normally link pho-
netically to the following noun, so do not really behave as
vowelless words.) In Russian, there are also prepositions
that consist of a single consonant letter, like k to, v in,
and s with. However, these forms are actually contrac-
tions of ko, vo, and so respectively, and these forms are
still used in modern Russian before words with certain
consonant clusters for ease of pronunciation.
In Kazakh and certain other Turkic languages, words
without vowel sounds may occur due to reduction of weak
vowels. A common example is the Kazakh word for one:
bir, pronounced [br]. Among careful speakers, however,
the original vowel may be preserved, and the vowels are
always preserved in the orthography.
In Southern varieties of Chinese, such as Cantonese and
Minnan, some monosyllabic words are made of exclu-
sively nasals, such as [m ] no and [] ve.
So far, all of these syllabic consonants, at least in the
lexical words, have been sonorants, such as [r], [l], [m],
and [n], which have a voiced quality similar to vow-
els. (They can carry tone, for example.) However,
there are languages with lexical words that not only con-
tain no vowels, but contain no sonorants at all, like
(non-lexical) shh! in English. These include some
Berber languages and some languages of the American
Pacic Northwest, such as Nuxalk. An example from
the latter is scs seal fat (pronounced [sxs], as spelled),
and a longer one is clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts (pronounced
[xptpskts]) he had had in his possession a
bunchberry plant. (Follow the Nuxalk link for other ex-
amples.) Berber examples include /tkkststt/ you took it
70 CHAPTER 19. VOWEL

one or two consonants only: // be, /ks/ feed on.[24] Words without consonants
(In Mandarin Chinese, words and syllables such as s and
zh are sometimes described as being syllabic fricatives Zero consonant
and aricates phonemically, // and /t/, but these do have
a voiced segment that carries the tone.) In the Japonic
language Miyako, there are words with no voiced sounds, 19.10 References
such as ss 'dust', kss 'breast/milk', pss 'day', 'a comb',
k 'to make', fks 'to build', ksks 'month', sks 'to cut', psks [1] Vowel. Online Etymology dictionary. Retrieved 12
'to pull'. April 2012.

[2] Laver, John (1994) Principles of Phonetics, Cambridge:

19.8.2 Words consisting of only vowels Cambridge University Press, p. 269.

[3] Crystal, David (2005) A Dictionary of Linguistics & Pho-

It is not uncommon for short grammatical words to con- netics (Fifth Edition), Maldern, MA/Oxford: Blackwell, p.
sist of only vowels, such as a and I in English. Lex- 494.
ical words are somewhat rarer in English and are gen-
erally restricted to a single syllable: eye, awe, owe, and [4] Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of
the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 323. ISBN
in non-rhotic accents air, ore, err. Vowel-only words of
0-631-19814-8.
more than one syllable are generally foreign loans, such
as ai (two syllables: /.i/) for the maned sloth, or proper [5] Ladefoged & Disner (2012) Vowels and Consonants, 3rd
names, such as Iowa (in some accents: /a.o./). ed., p. 132.
However, vowel sequences in hiatus are more freely al- [6] IPA (1999) Handbook of the IPA, p. 12.
lowed in some other languages, most famously perhaps in
Bantu and Polynesian languages, but also in Japanese and [7] According to Peter Ladefoged, traditional articulatory de-
Finnish. In such languages there tends to be a larger vari- scriptions such as height and backness are not entirely
satisfactory, and when phoneticians describe a vowel as
ety of vowel-only words. In Swahili (Bantu), for example,
high or low, they are in fact describing an acoustic quality
there is aua 'to survey' and eua 'to purify' (both three syl- rather than the actual position of the tongue. Ladefoged,
lables); in Japanese, aoi 'blue/green' and oioi 'grad- Peter (2006) A Course in Phonetics (Fifth Edition), Boston,
ually' (three and four syllables); and in Finnish, aie 'inten- MA: Thomson Wadsworth, p. 189.
tion' and auo 'open!' (both two syllables), although some
dialects pronounce them as aije and auvo. Hawaiian, and [8] John Esling (2005) There Are No Back Vowels: The La-
the Polynesian languages generally, have unusually large ryngeal Articulator Model, The Canadian Journal of Lin-
numbers of such words, such as aeea (a small green sh), guistics 50: 1344
which is three syllables: ae.e.a. Most long words in- [9] Ladefoged, Peter (1993) A Course in Phonetics (Third Edi-
volve reduplication, which is quite productive in Polyne- tion), Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 197.
sian: ioio 'grooves, eaea 'breath', uaua 'tough' (all four
syllables), auu 'crying' (ve syllables, from u (uw) 'to [10] Ladefoged, Peter (2001) A Course in Phonetics (Fourth
weep'), uoa or uouoa 'false mullet' (sp. sh, three or ve Edition), Fort Worth: Harcourt, p. 177.
syllables). The longest continuous vowel sequence is in [11] Ladefoged, Peter (2006) A Course in Phonetics (Fifth Edi-
Finnish word hyaie (wedding night intention). tion), Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, p. 189.

[12] Hayward, Katrina (2000) Experimental Phonetics, Harlow,

UK: Pearson, p. 160.
19.9 See also
[13] Deterding, David (1997). The formants of monophthong
English phonology vowels in Standard Southern British English Pronuncia-
tion. Journal of the International Phonetic Association.
Great Vowel Shift 27: 4755. doi:10.1017/S0025100300005417.

Inherent vowel [14] Hawkins, Sarah and Jonathan Midgley (2005). For-
mant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four
List of phonetics topics age groups of speakers. Journal of the Inter-
national Phonetic Association. 35 (2): 183199.
Mater lectionis doi:10.1017/S0025100305002124.
Scale of vowels [15] Harrington, Jonathan, Sallyanne Palethorpe and Catherine
Watson (2005) Deepening or lessening the divide between
Table of vowels
diphthongs: an analysis of the Queens annual Christmas
Vowel coalescence broadcasts. In William J. Hardcastle and Janet Mackenzie
Beck (eds.) A Figure of Speech: A Festschrift for John
Words without vowels Laver, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 227-261.
19.12. EXTERNAL LINKS 71

[16] Flemming, Edward and Stephanie Johnson (2007).
Rosas roses: reduced vowels in American English.
Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 37: 83
96. doi:10.1017/S0025100306002817.
[17] Deterding, David (2003). An instrumental study of
the monophthong vowels of Singapore English. English
World-Wide. 24: 116. doi:10.1075/eww.24.1.02det.
[18] Salbrina, Sharbawi (2006). The vowels of Brunei En-
glish: an acoustic investigation. English World-Wide. 27
(3): 247264. doi:10.1075/eww.27.3.03sha.
[19] Bohn, Ocke-Schwen (2004). How to organize a
fairly large vowel inventory: the vowels of Fer-
ing (North Frisian)" (PDF). Journal of the Inter-
national Phonetic Association. 34 (2): 161173.
doi:10.1017/S002510030400180X.
Ladefoged, Peter, Vowels and Consonants: An Intro-
duction to the Sounds of Languages, 2000. Blackwell
ISBN 978-0-631-21412-0.
Lindau, Mona. (1978). Vowel features. Lan-
guage. 54 (3): 541563. doi:10.2307/412786.
JSTOR 412786.
Stevens, Kenneth N. (1998). Acoustic phonetics.
Current studies in linguistics (No. 30). Cambridge,
MA: MIT. ISBN 978-0-262-19404-4.
Stevens, Kenneth N. (2000). Toward a model
for lexical access based on acoustic landmarks and
distinctive features. The Journal of the Acous-
tical Society of America. 111 (4): 18721891.
doi:10.1121/1.1458026. PMID 12002871.

[20] Gordon, Matthew and Ayla Applebaum (2006). Pho-
netic structures of Turkish Kabardian. Journal of the
International Phonetic Association. 36 (2): 159186.
doi:10.1017/S0025100306002532.
[21] Fletcher, Janet (2006) Exploring the phonetics of spoken
narratives in Australian indigenous languages. In William
J. Hardcastle and Janet Mackenzie Beck (eds.) A Fig-
ure of Speech: A Festschrift for John Laver, Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 201-226.
[22] In wyrm and myrrh, there is neither a vowel letter nor, in
rhotic dialects, a vowel sound.
[23] Values in open oral syllables
[24] Audio recordings of selected words without vowels can be
downloaded from .
Watt, D. and Tillotson, J. (2001). A spectro-
graphic analysis of vowel fronting in Bradford En-
glish. English World-Wide 22:2, 269302. Avail-
able at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/langling/resources/
Watt-Tillotson2001.pdf
19.12 External links
IPA chart with MP3 sound les
IPA vowel chart with AIFF sound les
Vowel charts for several dierent languages and di-
alects measuring F1 and F2
Materials for measuring and plotting vowel formants

Vowels and Consonants Online examples from

Ladefogeds Vowels and Consonants, referenced
19.11 Bibliography above.

Handbook of the International Phonetic Associa-

tion, 1999. Cambridge University ISBN 978-0-521-
63751-0

Johnson, Keith, Acoustic & Auditory Phonetics, sec-

ond edition, 2003. Blackwell ISBN 978-1-4051-
0123-3

Korhonen, Mikko. Koltansaamen opas, 1973. Cas-

treanum ISBN 978-951-45-0189-0

Ladefoged, Peter, A Course in Phonetics, fth edi-

tion, 2006. Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth
ISBN 978-1-4130-2079-3

Ladefoged, Peter, Elements of Acoustic Phonetics,

1995. University of Chicago ISBN 978-0-226-
46764-1

Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The

Sounds of the Worlds Languages. Oxford: Black-
well. ISBN 0-631-19814-8.
72 CHAPTER 19. VOWEL

19.13 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

19.13.1 Text
Aricate consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affricate_consonant?oldid=750080327 Contributors: Tarquin, Piotr
Gasiorowski, Gritchka, Wathiik, Perique des Palottes, Ahoerstemeier, Angela, Andres, Dwo, Nohat, IceKarma, Nickshanks, Denelson83,
Robbot, Babbage, Filemon, Djinn112, Eequor, Chameleon, Pne, J. 'mach' wust, Burschik, Sonett72, D6, Cacycle, Danakil, CanisRufus,
El C, Kwamikagami, Excalibre, Lysdexia, JoaoRicardo, Ross Burgess, Ish ishwar, Vuo, Angr, Graham87, TAKASUGI Shinji, BD2412,
Nlsanand, DePiep, Rjwilmsi, Nguyen Thanh Quang, FlaBot, Rrenner, Chobot, Ramorum, YurikBot, Witan, Hede2000, Aeusoes1, Ptcamn,
Bota47, Thnidu, RunOrDie, Tropylium, SmackBot, Reedy, Jasy jatere, Monkiavelli, Wakuran, Ignacioerrico, Afasmit, CSWarren, Octa-
hedron80, DHN-bot~enwiki, Can't sleep, clown will eat me, Grover cleveland, Cameron Nedland, Drphilharmonic, FlyHigh, Tesseran, U-
571, Atkinson 291, JorisvS, Tim Q. Wells, Bjankuloski06en~enwiki, Beard0, Pegasus1138, RekishiEJ, Filelakeshoe, John Riemann Soong,
Pajast, WeggeBot, FilipeS, Womtelo, Ante Aikio, Angryafghan, JAnDbot, DanPMK, .anacondabot, R'n'B, LordAnubisBOT, Idioma-
bot, VolkovBot, WarddrBOT, TXiKiBoT, Billinghurst, Drew.ward, Saom, Fanatix, SieBot, DragonBot, Kikos, DumZiBoT, WikHead,
SilvonenBot, Addbot, Logex008, Cuaxdon, Erutuon, Urpunkt, Zorrobot, Legobot, Luckas-bot, Ptbotgourou, AnomieBOT, Angry bee,
Grolltech, Mahmudmasri, ArthurBot, SnorlaxMonster, Xqbot, FaleBot, Nortaneous, GrouchoBot, Thehelpfulbot, FrescoBot, Cntrational,
HRoestBot, TobeBot, EmausBot, Macjacobus, BG19bot, Adamsa123, PrincessMissKim, Nelasuka, Lfdder, Ahls23, Chinadianalmonds,
BlanketPI, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, Peter238, Ithinc, Wugapodes, Urszag, InternetArchiveBot, GreenC bot and Anonymous: 69
Approximant consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximant_consonant?oldid=750182908 Contributors: Tobias Ho-
evekamp, Piotr Gasiorowski, Hannes Hirzel, Perique des Palottes, Michael Hardy, DopeshJustin, Miciah, Darkwind, Nohat, IceKarma,
Jor, Gilgamesh~enwiki, Zhen Lin, Ilikeverin, OwenBlacker, Burschik, Poccil, Florian Blaschke, CanisRufus, Kwamikagami, Mairi, Ha-
ham hanuka, Ogress, Valiantis, DeGabor, Angr, TAKASUGI Shinji, DePiep, Rjwilmsi, Chobot, YurikBot, Dnik, Gaius Cornelius, Aeu-
soes1, BOT-Superzerocool, GoodSirJava, Tropylium, SmackBot, Koryakov Yuri, Jerome Charles Potts, Lin linao, Croquant, VikSol, Sun-
darBot, Grover cleveland, Drphilharmonic, JorisvS, Bjankuloski06en~enwiki, 16@r, Laurens-af, Fitzwilliam, Tawkerbot2, Pajast, Mya-
suda, FilipeS, ST47, Escarbot, JAnDbot, STBotD, WarFox, Glossologist, VolkovBot, JhsBot, Spacevezon, Fanatix, SieBot, Snoxius, Ls-
freak, BenoniBot~enwiki, CharlesGillingham, ChandlerMapBot, Maniago, CowboySpartan, Stepheng3, Rui Gabriel Correia, Cuaxdon,
CarsracBot, Debresser, Legobot, Ptbotgourou, Anypodetos, Luizdl, Rogerb67, Rubinbot, Llusiduonbach, Citation bot, CleanUpAisle7,
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Peter238, InternetArchiveBot, GreenC bot and Anonymous: 40
Aspirated consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant?oldid=761035585 Contributors: Tarquin, Piotr
Gasiorowski, Arvindn, Wathiik, DennisDaniels, Lament, Mkweise, Ellywa, ThirdParty, Glenn, Andres, Eszett, Nohat, Owen, Puz-
zletChung, Robbot, Wereon, Arun, Varlaam, Gilgamesh~enwiki, Ferdinand Pienaar, Utcursch, J. 'mach' wust, Ran, Kaldari, Rdsmith4,
Bumm13, Muijz, Poccil, Pjacobi, Kjoonlee, El C, Mulder1982, Kwamikagami, Tcp-ip, Lysdexia, Ogress, JoaoRicardo, Maqs, Wood-
stone, Angr, Alsorises, Deltabeignet, DePiep, Ketiltrout, Loggie, Korg, YurikBot, Eupator, Ori Livneh, JHJ, Aeusoes1, Thnidu, Hyhens,
Tropylium, SmackBot, Ciacchi, Koryakov Yuri, MalafayaBot, Can't sleep, clown will eat me, Grover cleveland, BostonMA, Drmaik, Soap,
Kevin908, JorisvS, Pajast, FilipeS, Oryanw~enwiki, Ante Aikio, Oerjan, Kcmamu, JAnDbot, Nyttend, J.delanoy, Numbo3, M-le-mot-dit,
Miskwito, DH85868993, Blankego, TXiKiBoT, JhsBot, Elyada, Fanatix, SieBot, Kotabatubara, TX55, ClueBot, Hongthay, SchreiberBike,
Muro Bot, Apparition11, TaalVerbeteraar, Jafeluv, Eall n le, Cuaxdon, Numbo3-bot, Erutuon, Luckas-bot, Yobot, AnomieBOT, Llywe-
lynII, Xqbot, Wcoole, Shimmin Beg, Acct001, Remember me (up to 7 days), The Wiki ghost, LucienBOT, Longrim, RedBot, Watisctie,
DARTH SIDIOUS 2, RjwilmsiBot, EmausBot, WikitanvirBot, Frietjes, Helpful Pixie Bot, Titodutta, Serafn33, Gorobay, Phonology,
Mahtrqerin, JPaestpreornJeolhlna, Ellpicre, W. P. Uzer, SJ Defender, Gati123, AnnaBorgida, Peter238, Wgarcia, IvanScrooge98, Bender
the Bot, Orai Dellaposteira and Anonymous: 61
Flap consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flap_consonant?oldid=755449919 Contributors: DopeshJustin, Nohat, IceKarma,
Morwen, Zhen Lin, Eroica, D6, 4pq1injbok, Kjoonlee, Evice, CanisRufus, El C, Szyslak, Kwamikagami, RoyBoy, Caesura, Ross Burgess,
Ish ishwar, Angr, Slomox, Karmosin, BD2412, DePiep, Tizio, Chobot, YurikBot, Aeusoes1, ColinMcMillen, AndrewWTaylor, Magical-
saumy, Bluebot, Mgeorg~enwiki, Tsca.bot, Huon, C0pernicus, JorisvS, Bjankuloski06en~enwiki, Luokehao, IvanLanin, Grammargeek,
MarkJJones, Thijs!bot, Oerjan, J.delanoy, LokiClock, TXiKiBoT, Jeeny, Fanatix, Xiaq, Niceguyedc, ChandlerMapBot, Maniago, Ad-
dbot, Cuaxdon, CarsracBot, Proton donor, Lightbot, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Llusiduonbach, Xqbot, Wilmardeangelis, GrouchoBot, A. di M.,
EmausBot, Drammock, ZroBot, Bruceabirch, Victor Yus, YFdyh-bot, 1234qwer1234qwer4, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, TheBook-
ishOne, Peter238 and Anonymous: 31
Fricative consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fricative_consonant?oldid=762924976 Contributors: Piotr Gasiorowski,
Perique des Palottes, Karl Palmen, Steverapaport, DopeshJustin, Menchi, Axlrosen, Ruhrjung, Nohat, Lfh, IceKarma, Spikey, Denel-
son83, Xiaopo, Ruakh, Dbenbenn, Zhen Lin, Ilikeverin, Mzajac, Burschik, 4pq1injbok, AxSkov, Kjoonlee, CanisRufus, Kwamikagami,
WestonRuter, Ranveig, Ish ishwar, DeGabor, Angr, RHaworth, LinguisticsStud, Graham87, TAKASUGI Shinji, DePiep, Mike Segal,
Chobot, Bgwhite, YurikBot, Dnik, Hede2000, RadioKirk, Jplatts, Aeusoes1, Ptcamn, Bota47, Wikipeditor, Tropylium, SmackBot, Es-
kimbot, Duke Ganote, Chris the speller, Drphilharmonic, J.smith, Soap, JorisvS, Bjankuloski06en~enwiki, Laurens-af, Pajast, WeggeBot,
FilipeS, Thijs!bot, Nick Number, Istartres, Dreaded Walrus, MartinBot, Azalea pomp, VolkovBot, Rei-bot, GlobeGores, Billinghurst,
Drew.ward, Fanatix, SieBot, MHBYY, Xiaq, RafaAzevedo, DragonBot, Tide rolls, , Megaman en m, Legobot, Yobot, Llusiduonbach,
ArthurBot, XZeroBot, GrouchoBot, RibotBOT, FrescoBot, LucienBOT, D'ohBot, RedBot, EmausBot, Gorthian, Adamsa123, Ahls23, SJ
Defender, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, Peter238, Coeec, CAPTAIN RAJU, , Anticontradictor, Leschnei and Anonymous: 49
Fundamental frequency Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_frequency?oldid=763318219 Contributors: The Anome, El-
lywa, Furrykef, Hyacinth, Robbot, Giftlite, Kelson, Qef, Discospinster, Guanabot, Ish ishwar, Gpvos, Gene Nygaard, Oleg Alexandrov,
Dbolton, MONGO, BD2412, Kbdank71, Fresheneesz, Diza, Jacksonbb, YurikBot, TexasAndroid, Taejo, Gaius Cornelius, Zwobot, Smack-
Bot, Freestyle~enwiki, Eskimbot, Moshe Constantine Hassan Al-Silverburg, Rrburke, Derek R Bullamore, Fuzzbox, OnBeyondZebrax,
Lessthanadam, Tawkerbot4, Enter The Crypt, Mentisto, Mr synth, Black Stripe, MartinBot, Kateshortforbob, SamarthR, VolkovBot,
SCriBu, Yeokaiwei, Houtlijm~enwiki, Aamackie, Gorank4, SieBot, Happysailor, Fangjian, ClueBot, Binksternet, Mild Bill Hiccup, Drag-
onBot, Carriearchdale, 1ForTheMoney, AC+79 3888, Zlam007, Avish2217, Olli Niemitalo, Fgnievinski, CanadianLinuxUser, WikiDe-
gausser, SpBot, Mpz, Ehrenkater, , Zorrobot, Peni, Num43, Legobot, Yobot, VengeancePrime, Rjanag, Br77rino, Internoob, Jef-
isch, Erik9bot, Constructive editor, FrescoBot, Lookang, Rotideypoc41352, Awood711, Aakash2525, Jimmayjr, Domenzain, John of
Reading, Bollyje, Dmk166, L Kensington, ClueBot NG, Panchobook, Matsge, BattyBot, LimpSpider, Lugia2453, Faizan, Nbrader, The
Black Notes, Skr15081997, Quivico, Bender the Bot and Anonymous: 80
19.13. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES 73

Harmonic Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic?oldid=764175933 Contributors: Tarquin, Nevilley, Michael Hardy,

Gnomon42, Stevenj, Charles Matthews, MatrixFrog, Wik, Furrykef, Hyacinth, Omegatron, Moriori, Altenmann, CompUTOSer~enwiki,
Giftlite, Gwalla, Art Carlson, Mark Richards, Ds13, Mcapdevila, Alexander.stohr, Zhen Lin, Karl Naylor, Mckaysalisbury, CALR, Dis-
cospinster, Jpgordon, Schnolle, RainbowOfLight, Linas, Ylem, BillC, LexCorp, Wahoove, Ncc1701zzz, Erebus555, Rbeas, Soundguy99,
Mathbot, Margosbot~enwiki, RexNL, Sborsody, Riki, GreyCat, Srleer, Stephenb, ENeville, Albedo, Xdenizen, Daniel Mietchen, Cow-
pie~enwiki, RL0919, Enormousdude, Deville, Allens, SmackBot, Ohnoitsjamie, Landen99, Geevee, Frap, MichaelBillington, MortalMad-
Man, Just plain Bill, LDHan, Dragony298, JzG, Breno, Frokor, Dicklyon, Kvng, OnBeyondZebrax, Chetvorno, CRGreathouse, David s
gra, Foyster, R.christie, Rocket000, MesserWoland, WinBot, Darklilac, Zondran, Sluzzelin, Tahome, Vekou, David Eppstein, Josephfe-
instein, Patstuart, Robin S, B9 hummingbird hovering, Black Stripe, Anaxial, R'n'B, Steve98052, Maurice Carbonaro, Acalamari, SharkD,
Uranium grenade, Sparafucil, Jnsf, Fluy89, Knverma, Tomaat~enwiki, MusicScience, Slinto, Michelet, Anonymous Dissident, Wasser-
mann~enwiki, Houtlijm~enwiki, Gerrywright, Scottywong, David Be, Chridd, YuriLandman, Kenanjabr, ClueBot, Binksternet, Bradsm01,
Hongthay, Bremerenator, MelonBot, RMFan1, InternetMeme, Addbot, GyroMagician, Kaustin6969, Couposanto, W axell, Yobot, 2D,
Backfromquadrangle, Mmxx, CombatMarshmallow, Jim1138, Another Stickler, Bob Burkhardt, Maxis ftw, Dodove, Mnmngb, Lookang,
Oliverlyc, Dewritech, PBS-AWB, Josve05a, ClueBot NG, Chester Markel, Vitashaomi, AlexGTV, MerlIwBot, Lead holder, BG19bot, Sam
River, Khazar2, Er.Shalin, MatteX, Spike0x, Yikkayaya, Vivekhpandya, V.sureshkumar6160, Katie Henry, Bear-rings, Luciano Drossi
and Anonymous: 136
Lateral consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_consonant?oldid=761064082 Contributors: Tobias Hoevekamp, Lee
Daniel Crocker, The Anome, Piotr Gasiorowski, Andre Engels, Gritchka, Enchanter, Perique des Palottes, DopeshJustin, TUF-KAT,
Nohat, IceKarma, Benwing, Hippietrail, Gwalla, Gilgamesh~enwiki, Zhen Lin, Eequor, Poccil, 4pq1injbok, Cacycle, CanisRufus, Kwamik-
agami, Mairi, Lysdexia, Ish ishwar, Stephan Leeds, Angr, Lochaber, Graham87, TAKASUGI Shinji, DePiep, Amire80, FlaBot, Malhonen,
Chobot, Bgwhite, YurikBot, RussBot, JHJ, Aeusoes1, Welsh, Howcheng, Tropylium, SmackBot, Khoikhoi, Robosh, JorisvS, Bjanku-
loski06en~enwiki, Mr Stephen, Norm mit, Joseph Solis in Australia, CmdrObot, Gyopi, Daraven123, Pajast, FilipeS, Thijs!bot, Escarbot,
JAnDbot, Io Katai, Smallchanges, Aminullah, Melsaran, Spacevezon, Felix ahlner, Fanatix, SieBot, Yongjik, DragonBot, Zdravljica, Ma-
niago, Tdslk, Ost316, Karath, Addbot, LaaknorBot, Erutuon, AnomieBOT, Neko85, Llusiduonbach, Obersachsebot, GrouchoBot, Ribot-
BOT, Haploidavey, Benny White, Benimation, EmausBot, Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV, Wbm1058, D9943216, Adamsa123, Money money
tickle parsnip, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, Peter238, LaLingvisto, Tymon.r, Mr KEBAB and Anonymous: 38
Nasal consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_consonant?oldid=759008973 Contributors: Lee Daniel Crocker, 0,
Gritchka, PierreAbbat, Perique des Palottes, Karl Palmen, Hirzel, Montrealais, Rbrwr, Modster, DopeshJustin, Nikai, Nohat, David
Latapie, IceKarma, PuzzletChung, Benwing, Babbage, Zhen Lin, Ilikeverin, Gadum, Mzajac, Burschik, Klemen Kocjancic, Alikhtarov,
Grstain, Poccil, Guanabot, AxSkov, CanisRufus, Livajo, El C, Mulder1982, Kwamikagami, MPerel, Ogress, Mark Dingemanse, Hip-
popha~enwiki, LinguisticsStud, Graham87, DePiep, Amire80, FlaBot, Chobot, YurikBot, Pigman, Aeusoes1, Terli, Bota47, Tropy-
lium, Ledward, Torgo, SmackBot, Jasy jatere, Zerida, Od Mishehu, Peter Isotalo, Octahedron80, Cameron Nedland, Drphilharmonic,
Epingchris, JorisvS, Hemmingsen, Bjankuloski06en~enwiki, Laurens-af, Amakuru, Grammatical error, CRGreathouse, Pmcanena, Pa-
jast, Neelix, FilipeS, Studerby, Kwaku~enwiki, Thijs!bot, Nick Number, Inbetweener, DanPMK, JNW, Mmoneypenny, R'n'B, VolkovBot,
Someguy1221, JhsBot, Fanatix, SheepNotGoats, BenoniBot~enwiki, TX55, Xiaq, Mx. Granger, ChandlerMapBot, DragonBot, No such
user, Excirial, Maniago, Kikos, Addbot, Luckas-bot, Yobot, AnomieBOT, Materialscientist, Llusiduonbach, ArthurBot, Jchthys, Xqbot,
Linda Martens, RibotBOT, FrescoBot, Cricketman2000, Pinethicket, Hluup, Jesse V., Ripchip Bot, EmausBot, M. Adiputra, RA0808,
Lguipontes, HTML2011, YFdyh-bot, Sriharsh1234, 888gowinda, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, 39ex and Anonymous: 53
Nasalization Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasalization?oldid=756640437 Contributors: Nohat, Bloodshedder, Eroica, Guppyn-
soup, Tsujigiri~enwiki, Kjoonlee, Jnestorius, Kwamikagami, Circeus, Ish ishwar, Angr, BillC, DePiep, LjL, YurikBot, Hede2000, Aeu-
soes1, Seanver~enwiki, Tropylium, SmackBot, Croquant, Cameron Nedland, Ligulembot, Robosh, JorisvS, Pajast, FilipeS, Cydebot,
Verdy p, Womtelo, Jose Antonio~enwiki, Thijs!bot, Luna Santin, Idioma-bot, LokiClock, A4bot, Akerbeltz, HTurtle, Polishwonder74,
TX55, Thegryseone, Niceguyedc, Zack wadghiri, No such user, MacedonianBoy, Tdslk, Addbot, Preposterone, Luizdl, AnomieBOT,
ArthurBot, FoxBot, TjBot, EmausBot, John of Reading, Jay-Sebastos, ClueBot NG, Helpful Pixie Bot, Cameron6426a, Siuenti, JPaestpre-
ornJeolhlna, Khu'hamgaba Kitap and Anonymous: 18
Overtone singing Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone_singing?oldid=757185374 Contributors: Tarquin, Ed Poor, PierreAb-
bat, Deb, David spector, Hephaestos, Ubiquity, Michael Hardy, Willsmith, Kku, Dcljr, Tzaquiel, SebastianHelm, Ellywa, Jimfbleak, TUF-
KAT, TUF-KAT, Alex756, Hashar, Ventura, Charles Matthews, N-true, Wik, Zoicon5, Hyacinth, Robbot, Altenmann, Romanm, Merovin-
gian, Tcotrel, MilkMiruku, Kevin Sa, DocWatson42, Everyking, Michael Devore, Kaelia, Gadum, Slowking Man, LucasVB, Antandrus,
Evertype, Karol Langner, Rdsmith4, Untier, Sam Hocevar, ArthurDenture, Larrybob, Mindspillage, TrbleClef, Florian Blaschke, Tsu-
jigiri~enwiki, Bender235, Kwamikagami, Ranveig, Keenan Pepper, Itsjustanalias, Theodore Kloba, Denial, Wadems, Axeman89, Soltak,
Woohookitty, Fathergorry, Eleassar777, BD2412, Bunchofgrapes, Behemoth, Wahoove, Joel D. Reid, Amire80, Stardust8212, Unfo-
cused, Bitosh, Hottentot, Sborsody, Le Anh-Huy, Ahpook, YurikBot, CodeGeneratR, Hairy Dude, Coppertwins, FrenchIsAwesome,
Hede2000, Takwish, Gaius Cornelius, Stassats, Badagnani, Kyle Barbour, Mtze, Deville, IvanP~enwiki, CapitalLetterBeginning, Eshe,
Kingboyk, Sller, Crystallina, SmackBot, Alex Ex, Kintetsubualo, Typhoonchaser, Blackeld, Mcld, ERcheck, WilliamDenton, Kee-
gan, MalafayaBot, Mahlered, Nixeagle, Tttallis, Radagast83, Makemi, Aeln, Latebird, Cyssis, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Devan Miller,
Bucksburg, JorisvS, Physis, Shamrox, Bendzh, Dicklyon, Mabeac, Lasirene, CRocka05, Hu12, CmdrObot, Jeanbubley, Samuell, Slp1,
Yeanold Viskersenn, DBaba, Jazzmoth, Karashay, NorthernThunder, Omicronpersei8, Mr pand, Ldoron, Aiwetir, Leon7, Jonny-mt, Anti-
VandalBot, KP Botany, Didgeweb, Storkk, Aenguseire, NapoliRoma, MER-C, DerekDD, Patxi lurra, Ggugvunt, Jerome Kohl, Cgingold,
JaGa, Pax:Vobiscum, B9 hummingbird hovering, Bissinger, R'n'B, Gate-way, Belovedfreak, Albakultur~enwiki, STBotD, Idioma-bot,
VolkovBot, K W LaQua, Fences and windows, Homun, S vecchiato, Davidhykes, Lupin1022, Jsrachele, Dgmoran, Akerbeltz, Hout-
lijm~enwiki, Malzie 82, Jgrigar, Pjoef, SieBot, Moore2006, WordSalad87, David Be, Hzh, StaticGull, Cyfal, Dodger67, Monew, Owl-
monkey, ClueBot, Admiral Norton, Mainmre, Mild Bill Hiccup, Boing! said Zebedee, Fenwayguy, Trivialist, Lew21~enwiki, Jenlily2,
Sun Creator, DILNN1, DumZiBoT, XLinkBot, Addbot, Opus88888, Panicus, Redheylin, Roux, Tassedethe, Lightbot, OlEnglish, Jarble,
Legobot, Drpickem, Luckas-bot, Yobot, II MusLiM HyBRiD II, SignalProcessing, Backfromquadrangle, THEN WHO WAS PHONE?,
Vini 17bot5, AnomieBOT, Badums, Royote, LilHelpa, Xqbot, Mooka77, Tansulpan Burakaeva, Soriah23, A.amitkumar, Joannaguy, Nat-
GeoMusicIntern, Arachnologist, D'ohBot, Gardik, Idiomcopy, Jenskas, Bowrain13, MastiBot, Der Elbenkoenig, Cnwilliams, Bobohk,
Kivalouise, Known2no1, Specs112, EmausBot, ZroBot, DavidJWeir, Aaronshupp, Wmayner, Dk1919 Franking, Folkartist20, ClueBot
NG, BarrelProof, Elvonudinium, Helpful Pixie Bot, BG19bot, Hayakaru, NotWith, MathewTownsend, Khazar2, Makecat-bot, Cassa342,
Quanghaitran, Faizan, Gh26, Parabolooidal, Khiruge, Russl, Greg Dahlen, Createaccountyes and Anonymous: 220
Sibilant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibilant?oldid=762185630 Contributors: Tarquin, Montrealais, DopeshJustin, Gabbe,
Ruhrjung, Charles Matthews, Pm67nz, Silvonen, Indefatigable, PuzzletChung, Bearcat, Benwing, Gilgamesh~enwiki, Eequor, Karl-Henner,
74 CHAPTER 19. VOWEL

Kdammers, Florian Blaschke, CanisRufus, Kwamikagami, Man vyi, Nsaa, Inge-Lyubov, Vuo, Woohookitty, Damezi, LinguisticsStud,
BD2412, Lebha, Imnotminkus, CaseKid, Mcsven, YurikBot, Aeusoes1, Anetode, Northstop, Csobankai Aladar, SMcCandlish, Tropylium,
SmackBot, IstvanWolf, Ciacchi, Glengordon01, Rrburke, Ligulembot, Atkinson 291, Robosh, JorisvS, Bjankuloski06en~enwiki, Ivan-
Lanin, Wolfdog, CRGreathouse, CmdrObot, Pajast, Oerjan, Nick Number, WinBot, JAnDbot, Magioladitis, JPG-GR, R'n'B, Numbo3,
AlleborgoBot, George-E, Denisarona, Alexbot, Edit-or-perish, Aucassin, Addbot, Poco a poco, Erutuon, OlEnglish, Zorrobot, Leovizza,
Luckas-bot, Yobot, Luizdl, AnomieBOT, Omnipaedista, Uanfala, Rokirovka, EmausBot, ZroBot, SporkBot, Lguipontes, Yceren Loq,
ClueBot NG, Spannerjam, , Sanzuwu13, Discuss-Dubious, Joysloy, SLPtobe, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, Lord
Marcellus, Cpt Wise, Ghost Lourde, WangZihao, Deuteranopia, Mr KEBAB, NoToleranceForIntolerance and Anonymous: 36
Stop consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_consonant?oldid=758708508 Contributors: Lee Daniel Crocker, Brion VIB-
BER, Tbackstr, Piotr Gasiorowski, Gritchka, Wathiik, Karl Palmen, Hirzel, Montrealais, Nd12345, DopeshJustin, Stephen C. Carlson,
Eszett, Nohat, IceKarma, Furrykef, Cleduc, Joy, Robbot, Zinnmann, Zhen Lin, Eequor, J. 'mach' wust, Mzajac, Supadawg, Burschik,
Grstain, Poccil, 4pq1injbok, Cacycle, CanisRufus, Kwamikagami, The bellman, Aaronbrick, 2-bits, Jojit fb, Dr Zen, Ish ishwar, Angr,
Woohookitty, Mindmatrix, Georgia guy, BernardM, DePiep, Nihiltres, Chobot, YurikBot, Dnik, Hede2000, Pawyilee, Modify, JoanneB,
Wikipeditor, Tropylium, SmackBot, Zerida, Eskimbot, Psiphiorg, Bill Shillito, Glengordon01, SundarBot, Grover cleveland, Drphilhar-
monic, Ligulembot, Schnazola, Ergative rlt, JorisvS, Bjankuloski06en~enwiki, Dia^, John Riemann Soong, Pajast, FilipeS, Murasakint,
Escarbot, Emeraldcityserendipity, Benjaburns, Darklilac, JAnDbot, DanPMK, MartinBot, Numbo3, Idioma-bot, VolkovBot, TXiKiBoT,
Broadbot, Akerbeltz, AlleborgoBot, Fanatix, SieBot, Briesling, Polishwonder74, TX55, Wahrmund, Fyyer, No such user, NuclearWarfare,
Kikos, DumZiBoT, Addbot, Jafeluv, Wickey-nl, Eall n le, Erutuon, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Ptbotgourou, AnomieBOT, Adeliine, ArthurBot,
Xqbot, Capricorn42, Spinach Monster, Kompar~enwiki, D'ohBot, TobeBot, Fama Clamosa, EmausBot, John of Reading, WikitanvirBot,
Ida Shaw, Philoponos, ChuispastonBot, Lord Roem, Mmmm cake, PrincessMissKim, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, Akafeatfausty, Urszag,
LostQueen and Anonymous: 49
Tenseness Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenseness?oldid=764971101 Contributors: Damian Yerrick, Derek Ross, Dcoetzee,
DHN, Ruakh, Gildong7, J. 'mach' wust, Kjoonlee, Kwamikagami, Army1987, Ish ishwar, Stephan Leeds, Angr, Cassowary, Chobot, Hairy
Dude, Denihilonihil, 4tildes~enwiki, Megalophias, 16@r, Wolfdog, FilipeS, Dawnseeker2000, WinBot, Rothorpe, Eve Teschlemacher,
Kotabatubara, Rui Gabriel Correia, Addbot, Cuaxdon, Erutuon, Luckas-bot, Yobot, AnomieBOT, Rjanag, Alph Bot, Liquidmetalrob,
Trax247, Helpful Pixie Bot, Phunanon and Anonymous: 15
Trill consonant Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trill_consonant?oldid=760701666 Contributors: William Avery, Menchi, Gob-
lin, Nohat, IceKarma, PuzzletChung, Insomniak, Zhen Lin, Kusunose, CanisRufus, El C, Szyslak, Kwamikagami, Muntsh, Ish ish-
war, BD2412, DePiep, DDerby, Chobot, Dnik, Terli, Petusek, Zwobot, Tropylium, Guifa, Od Mishehu, Eskimbot, Ligulembot, Vina-
iwbot~enwiki, Robosh, JorisvS, Bjankuloski06en~enwiki, Luokehao, Iridescent, Laurens-af, Pegasus1138, Pajast, FilipeS, Verdy p,
Thijs!bot, Kilva, JAnDbot, TheThinWhiteDuke, NewEnglandYankee, Wiae, AlleborgoBot, Fanatix, The Dropper, RafaAzevedo, Drag-
onBot, Maniago, Ost316, Addbot, Luckas-bot, Luizdl, AnomieBOT, Gitgo567, Llusiduonbach, Bobby big breifs, Xqbot, GrouchoBot,
Double sharp, Klbrain, ClueBot NG, BG19bot, Si Gam, Gorthian, Dexbot, Trilelea, SJ Defender, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, Peter238,
Sigehelmus and Anonymous: 27
Vocal folds Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_folds?oldid=762586289 Contributors: Vicki Rosenzweig, Bryan Derksen, The
Anome, Piotr Gasiorowski, SimonP, Merphant, DopeshJustin, Cameron Dewe, Julesd, Nohat, Jogloran, Furrykef, Grendelkhan, Mtcv,
Branddobbe, Robbot, Dduck, Rholton, Auric, Adam78, DavidCary, MSGJ, Bensaccount, Hiyayaywhopee, Pne, DragonySixtyseven, Ok-
nazevad, Perey, Tordek ar, Rich Farmbrough, Tsujigiri~enwiki, Kwamikagami, Bobo192, Jwink3101, Smalljim, Arcadian, La goutte de
pluie, Haham hanuka, APPER, Eric Kvaalen, Keenan Pepper, Ish ishwar, Kamezuki, Nuno Tavares, Shreevatsa, Graham87, Jclemens,
Rjwilmsi, Strait, Tbone, PhatRita, Sborsody, Srleer, Commander Nemet, YurikBot, Matanya (renamed), RussBot, Chris Capoccia,
Hydrargyrum, Welsh, Thiseye, SirWoland, Cinik, Newagelink, Light current, Theodolite, StuRat, Babakgh, AGToth, DVD R W, Smack-
Bot, Delldot, Eskimbot, Lainagier, Srnec, Mcld, Datameister, Armeria, RDBrown, Kleinzach, Anchoress, Con, Yidisheryid, TheKMan,
Grover cleveland, Rajrajmarley, Esrever, Bzorro, Epingchris, Lisapollison, Knights who say ni, Joseph Solis in Australia, Nutster, Butlertd,
.Koen, JVinocur, Yavapava~enwiki, Slp1, Nssanes, Ssilvers, Thijs!bot, Escarbot, Darklilac, I'll bring the food, JAnDbot, Jessicapierce,
Eirik T., Rettetast, RockMFR, Theo Mark, Mcapplbee, McSly, Lzyvzl, Zojj, Daviticus82, Sk741~enwiki, Nrswanson, 2112 rush, - tSR -
Nth Man, SieBot, Aesthetic.online, Lisatwo, OKBot, Polishwonder74, Andrij Kursetsky, WikipedianMarlith, ClueBot, Eriksiers, Inrabas,
21daysbrook, Johnuniq, KrankyKat~enwiki, Gimmethoseshoes, Addbot, Oenbach, Olli Niemitalo, Download, LaaknorBot, OlEnglish,
Taketa, Nuberger13, Zorrobot, Yobot, Avaladar, Max, AnomieBOT, Rjanag, Materialscientist, LilHelpa, Addihockey10, Eags, Blantona,
Smilly face, Tongzhixiang123, MastiBot, Corinne68, FoxBot, Lotje, Inferior Olive, Sgravn, DARTH SIDIOUS 2, Hajatvrc, EmausBot,
WikitanvirBot, Klbrain, Dcirovic, Werieth, Ruislick0, , Will Beback Auto, ClueBot NG, CocuBot, Chester Markel, Widr, Helpful
Pixie Bot, BG19bot, Anatomist90, The Illusive Man, JakobSteenberg, Bugrhees, Syrinx123, Iztwoz, Panpog1, LT910001, MylesSG, Prav-
ito, Ishkabible59, Thephil12312, Monkbot, Filedelinkerbot, Sawdust Restaurant, Yatharth9102, Tilifa Ocaufa, Speech 33, 5supremebeing,
Fuortu, Bender the Bot, Meagan.Honigman and Anonymous: 179
Voice (phonetics) Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_(phonetics)?oldid=745471040 Contributors: Perique des Palottes, Nohat,
Pakaran, Ambarish, Gwalla, Everyking, J. 'mach' wust, Mukerjee, Zenohockey, Kwamikagami, La goutte de pluie, Ish ishwar, Drbrezn-
jev, Angr, Mindmatrix, Mandarax, DePiep, Hairy Dude, Pigman, Grubber, Aeusoes1, AdiJapan, SmackBot, Gailtb, Polyhedron, JorisvS,
FilipeS, Khatru2, D4g0thur, EJR~enwiki, Dan Pelleg, Hellerick, Rising*From*Ashes, Munci, Fanatix, Doctoruy, TX55, No such user,
Tonkawa68, Computer97, Addbot, Rogerb67, Raimundo Pastor, TwigsCogito, Caviler, Ticklewickleukulele, John of Reading, ClueBot
NG, BG19bot, Tosek, Cukanovoleg, 93, Lfdder, SelshSeahorse and Anonymous: 33
Voice-onset time Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-onset_time?oldid=751646290 Contributors: ThirdParty, Nohat, Everyking,
Bender235, Kwamikagami, Richwales, Isnow, Rjwilmsi, Cassowary, Ground Zero, YurikBot, Hairy Dude, SmackBot, Ligulembot, Joseph
Solis in Australia, Armchairlinguist, Astrothomas, Vynbos, Polishwonder74, Alexbot, Versus22, MystBot, Addbot, , Luckas-bot,
Yobot, Rjanag, Royote, Bearnfder, FrescoBot, Dick Grune, BG19bot, Carolinesigouin, Me, Myself, and I are Here, Vkulikov, Bertiebella
and Anonymous: 13
Vowel Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel?oldid=764972990 Contributors: Damian Yerrick, Derek Ross, Lee Daniel Crocker,
Brion VIBBER, Mav, Tarquin, Taw, Andre Engels, Pgdudda, PierreAbbat, Hannes Hirzel, Robert Foley, Heron, Karl Palmen, Hirzel,
Youandme, Hephaestos, PhilipMW, Michael Hardy, DopeshJustin, Shoaler, Iluvcapra, Looxix~enwiki, Ihcoyc, Ellywa, Den fjttrade
ankan~enwiki, Susurrus, Kaihsu, Ruhrjung, BRG, Raven in Orbit, Feedmecereal, Dcoetzee, Nohat, Wik, Saltine, Fibonacci, Raul654,
Jerzy, Owen, RadicalBender, Denelson83, Donarreiskoer, Robbot, Astronautics~enwiki, Romanm, Ojigiri~enwiki, Intangir, JackofOz,
Adam78, David Gerard, Weialawaga~enwiki, Gwalla, Laudaka, Lupin, Zigger, Everyking, Henry Flower, Hans-Friedrich Tamke, LLarson,
19.13. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES 75

Gilgamesh~enwiki, Chameleon, Andycjp, Keith Edkins, J. 'mach' wust, Mzajac, Vbs, RetiredUser2, Phil1988, Creidieki, Burschik, Lac-
rimosus, Kate, Freakofnurture, 4pq1injbok, Naive cynic, Parishan, Florian Blaschke, Andrejj, Kjoonlee, Jnestorius, CanisRufus, Kwamik-
agami, QuartierLatin1968, Bookofjude, Circeus, Caeruleancentaur, Lachaume, Jakew, Ranveig, JohnyDog, Alansohn, Betty, QVanillaQ,
Hippopha~enwiki, Joris Gillis, Ross Burgess, Sobolewski, Einstein9073, Ish ishwar, Wtshymanski, Max Naylor, Vuo, N0thingness, Angr,
Woohookitty, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard, Waldir, Junes, Cedrus-Libani, Nema Fakei, Graham87, DePiep, Edison, Rjwilmsi, OneWeird-
Dude, Salleman, Gd, LjL, Brighterorange, Cassowary, FlaBot, Naraht, RobertG, Estrellador*, Who, Thecurran, Menopause, Chobot,
DVdm, Bgwhite, Kdehl, Mcsven, Wavelength, Hairy Dude, Chavash, Stephenb, Salsb, JHJ, NawlinWiki, Exit~enwiki, Edinborgarste-
fan, KissL, Aeusoes1, Twin Bird, Yahya Abdal-Aziz, Zamnedix, AdiJapan, Hakeem.gadi, Csobankai Aladar, LA RoeDoe, Socrates123b,
SanderNL, Thnidu, Theda, Fang Aili, Ayelis, BorgQueen, JLaTondre, RG2, NeilN, NickelShoe, That Guy, From That Show!, AndrewW-
Taylor, Eigenlambda, SmackBot, Errarel, AtilimGunesBaydin, Mdd4696, Paxse, Cessator, ParlorGames, Blackeld, Peter Isotalo, Gilliam,
ERcheck, Octahedron80, Hongooi, VikSol, Ioscius, Glengordon01, Khoikhoi, TheLateDentarthurdent, Jan.Kamenicek, Het, Serouj,
Ligulembot, Curly Turkey, TenPoundHammer, SashatoBot, MichaelGasser, Nareek, JackLumber, Epingchris, JorisvS, 16@r, KJS77,
Jc37, Gandalf1491, Joseph Solis in Australia, Shoeofdeath, Fsotrain09, Amakuru, Dlohcierekim, JForget, Wolfdog, Bahman3d~enwiki,
John Riemann Soong, Pajast, Kronecker, FilipeS, Gogo Dodo, Womtelo, Apus~enwiki, Garik, Thijs!bot, Wikid77, Ante Aikio, Drew-
erd, John254, AgentPeppermint, CharlotteWebb, Armchairlinguist, Robert Ullmann, Escarbot, Leewonbum, AntiVandalBot, DarkAu-
dit, Temblast, JAnDbot, Tigga, Deective, Sulejman, Coreydragon, Stella luna, QrczakMK, Tokenzero, Furscollis, Cpl Syx, CapnPrep,
MartinBot, RastaMongoose, Nikpapag, Keith D, J.delanoy, Thomasda, Thaurisil, Arthr, Ajmint, Krzysztofpawliszak, Mguinness, Dar-
rendeng, Mimursal, Juliancolton, STBotD, Treisijs, Bonadea, Idioma-bot, Glossologist, VolkovBot, Shinju, Aesopos, Philip Trueman,
TXiKiBoT, GimmeBot, Ged424, Rei-bot, Qxz, Monkey Bounce, Safulop, Katimawan2005, Purgatory Fubar, AlleborgoBot, Dire organic,
Bill Riojas Mclemore, Newbyguesses, EJF, Pare Mo, DionysiusThrax, SieBot, YonaBot, Gnominonwiki, Vanished user 82345ijgeke4tg,
Ks0stm, G.a.ys are di$gusting!, Sunrise, Anchor Link Bot, Dabomb87, Atif.t2, ClueBot, Bbadree, Maymay, TypoBoy, Zack wadghiri,
Kanguole, Estirabot, Vanhoabui, Terracescot, Arjayay, Muro Bot, SoxBot III, DumZiBoT, BodhisattvaBot, JMW64, Ost316, David de-
terding, SilvonenBot, Joe13013, Addbot, Pyfan, Dammacco, Non-dropframe, Eall n le, GeneralAtrocity, PauloCalipari, NjardarBot,
CarsracBot, Numbo3-bot, Tide rolls, David0811, Legobot, Luckas-bot, Yobot, Fraggle81, Jonasaznut, N3LSON666, Universal Life, Syn-
chronism, Leefeni de Karik, AnomieBOT, Quangbao, Rjanag, Jim1138, Materialscientist, Citation bot, Eumolpo, ArthurBot, Snorlax-
Monster, Obersachsebot, Xqbot, Hworost, The Fiddly Leprechaun, Mikydude, Zach693, Supernerd123456, GrouchoBot, RibotBOT, The
Wiki ghost, Frumphammer, Benny White, IJoey, Citation bot 1, Pinethicket, I dream of horses, Eciency54WS, RedBot, Impala2009,
Anvusp, FoxBot, TobeBot, Gaia5074Q, Duoduoduo, Kielbasa1, DISD, Stroppolo, Minimac, Ripchip Bot, Uanfala, EmausBot, Going-
Batty, Robertminard, XinaNicole, NotAnonymous0, Dcirovic, F, ElationAviation, Bry1996, Medeis, Dietermaurer, Staszek Lem, , Ste-
fan Milosevski, Jenga650, ChuispastonBot, Helpsome, ClueBot NG, Movses-bot, Melbourne3163, Widr, HaroX, Titodutta, Garygoh884,
BG19bot, Muzza24, GPepper, Accentman, TriviaMonth2011, CitationCleanerBot, Glevum, Mexicono411, Decruft, SonicBoom404, John
Stevens 20, Dylanvt, Webclient101, TwoTwoHello, BreakfastJr, Redd Foxx 1991, Bijsbddbindbihbjbdinfbhibfhisd, Kelly022096, Mis-
sandrew, Rockrunnerthecard, G S Palmer, Abgar eabe ghu, Renamed user kjkjlknm5632, Someofthem, Peter238, Jaketibb, Jackheart314,
KasparBot, H.dryad, ACleaningPerson and Anonymous: 288

19.13.2 Images
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cense: Public domain Contributors: The Tango! Desktop Project Original artist: The people from the Tango! project
File:Blank_vowel_trapezoid.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Blank_vowel_trapezoid.svg License:
CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors:
Blank_vowel_trapezoid.png Original artist: Blank_vowel_trapezoid.png: Denelson83 (talk contribs)
File:Cardinal_vowel_tongue_position-front.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Cardinal_vowel_
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File:Cardinal_vowels-Jones_x-ray.jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Cardinal_vowels-Jones_x-ray.
jpg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims). Original
artist: No machine-readable author provided. Ishwar~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Cello_natural_harmonics.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/19/Cello_natural_harmonics.png Li-
cense: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: Hyacinth
File:Close-mid_back_rounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Close-mid_back_rounded_
vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims).
Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
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unrounded_vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on
copyright claims). Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
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rounded_vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright
claims). Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Close-mid_central_unrounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Close-mid_central_
unrounded_vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copy-
right claims). Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Close-mid_front_rounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Close-mid_front_
rounded_vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright
claims). Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Close-mid_front_unrounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Close-mid_front_
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copyright claims). Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
76 CHAPTER 19. VOWEL

File:Close_back_rounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Close_back_rounded_vowel.ogg

License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims). Original
artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Close_back_unrounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Close_back_unrounded_
vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims).
Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Close_central_rounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/66/Close_central_rounded_
vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims).
Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
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vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims).
Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Close_front_rounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Close_front_rounded_vowel.ogg
License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims). Original
artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Close_front_unrounded_vowel.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Close_front_unrounded_
vowel.ogg License: CC-BY-SA-3.0 Contributors: No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims).
Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
File:Edit-clear.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Edit-clear.svg License: Public domain Contributors: The
Tango! Desktop Project. Original artist:
The people from the Tango! project. And according to the meta-data in the le, specically: Andreas Nilsson, and Jakub Steiner (although
minimally).
File:En-us-distend_distaste.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/En-us-distend_distaste.ogg License:
CC BY-SA 4.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: Erutuon
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File:Endolarynx_vocal_folds.jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/Endolarynx_vocal_folds.jpg License:
CC BY-SA 3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: Anatomist90
File:Esling_vowel_chart.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/05/Esling_vowel_chart.png License: CC-BY-SA-3.0
Contributors:
modied my le IPA vowel chart 2005.png
Original artist:
Kwamikagami
File:F0bothclosed.gif Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/F0bothclosed.gif License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Con-
tributors: Own work http://weelookang.blogspot.sg/2013/10/wikipedia-contribution-to-fundamental.html Original artist: Lookang many
thanks to author of original simulation = Juan M. Aguirregabiria author of Easy Java Simulation = Francisco Esquembre
File:F0bothopen.gif Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/F0bothopen.gif License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contrib-
utors: Own work http://weelookang.blogspot.sg/2013/10/wikipedia-contribution-to-fundamental.html Original artist: Lookang many
thanks to author of original simulation = Juan M. Aguirregabiria author of Easy Java Simulation = Francisco Esquembre
File:F0leftclosed.gif Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/F0leftclosed.gif License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contrib-
utors: Own work http://weelookang.blogspot.sg/2013/10/wikipedia-contribution-to-fundamental.html Original artist: Lookang many
thanks to author of original simulation = Juan M. Aguirregabiria author of Easy Java Simulation = Francisco Esquembre
File:F0rightclosed.gif Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/F0rightclosed.gif License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Con-
tributors: Own work http://weelookang.blogspot.sg/2013/10/wikipedia-contribution-to-fundamental.html Original artist: Lookang many
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File:Flageolette.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Flageolette.svg License: CC BY-SA 2.5 Contribu-
tors: made by me (Corel-Draw) Original artist: user:Mjchael
File:Gnome-mime-sound-openclipart.svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/
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File:Gray954.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/81/Gray954.png License: Public domain Contributors:
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File:Gray955.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Gray955.png License: Public domain Contributors:
Henry Gray (1918) Anatomy of the Human Body (See Book section below)
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File:Gray960.png Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Gray960.png License: Public domain Contributors:
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artist: Qef
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SA-3.0 Contributors: ? Original artist: ?
19.13. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES 77

File:Hi-___.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Hi-%E0%A4%9F%E0%A4%BE%

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File:Hy-EA-.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Hy-EA-%D5%A1%D5%B2%D5%B8%D5%
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File:Hy-EA-.ogg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Hy-EA-%D5%A3%D5%B6%D5%A1%D6%
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File:Illu_larynx.jpg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Illu_larynx.jpg License: Public domain Contributors:
? Original artist: ?
File:Labiodental_flap_(Gentium).svg Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Labiodental_flap_
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Zoid
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ogg License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contributors: Own work Original artist: TFighterPilot
File:Molecule1.gif Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/Molecule1.gif License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contributors:
Own work Original artist: Lookang many thanks to author of original simulation = Juan M. Aguirregabiria author of Easy Java Simulation
= Francisco Esquembre
File:Molecule2.gif Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Molecule2.gif License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contributors:
Own work Original artist: Lookang many thanks to author of original simulation = Juan M. Aguirregabiria author of Easy Java Simulation
= Francisco Esquembre
File:Molecule3.gif Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Molecule3.gif License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contributors:
Own work Original artist: Lookang many thanks to author of original simulation = Juan M. Aguirregabiria author of Easy Java Simulation
= Francisco Esquembre
File:Molecule4.gif Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Molecule4.gif License: CC BY-SA 3.0 Contributors:
Own work Original artist: Lookang many thanks to author of original simulation = Juan M. Aguirregabiria author of Easy Java Simulation
= Francisco Esquembre
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on copyright claims). Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
78 CHAPTER 19. VOWEL

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right claims). Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
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Original artist: No machine-readable author provided. Denelson83 assumed (based on copyright claims).
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19.13. TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES 79

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80 CHAPTER 19. VOWEL

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