A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together, forming a tight stricture. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German (the final consonant of Bach); or the side of the tongue against the molarss, in the case of Welsh (appearing twice in the name Llanelli). This turbulent airflow is called frication.

A particular subset of fricatives are sibilants, produced with higher amplitude and pitch, and with the airflow going on to strike the edge of some obstruction (such as the teeth). Examples of sibilants in English are .

The usage of two other terms is less standardized: "Spirant" is an older term used by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists for non-sibilant fricatives. It contrasts with the term "strident", which could just mean "sibilant", but some authors also include labiodental and uvular fricatives in the class.

Types

The airflow is not completely stopped in the production of fricative consonants. In other words, the airflow experiences friction.

Sibilant fricatives

• voiceless coronal sibilant, as in English sip

• voiced coronal sibilant, as in English zip

• voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant, as in English ship

• voiced palato-alveolar sibilant, as in English measure

• voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant

• voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant

• voiceless retroflex sibilant

• voiced retroflex sibilant

All sibilants are coronal, but may be dental, alveolar, postalveolar, or palatal (retroflex) within that range. However, alongside the differences in place of articulation, they exhibit a variety of tongue shapes. Prototypical retroflexes are subapical and palatal, but they are usually written with the same symbol as the apical postalveolars. The alveolars and dentals may also be either apical or laminal, but this difference is indicated with diacritics rather than with separate symbols.

Non-sibilant fricatives

Median fricatives

• voiceless bilabial fricative

• voiced bilabial fricative

• voiceless labiodental fricative, as in English fine

• voiced labiodental fricative, as in English vine

• voiceless linguolabial fricative

• voiced linguolabial fricative

• voiceless dental non-sibilant fricative, as in English thing

• voiced dental non-sibilant fricative, as in English that

• voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative

• voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative

• Voiceless alveolar fricative trill

• Voiced alveolar fricative trill

• voiceless palatal fricative

• voiced palatal fricative

• voiceless velar fricative

• voiced velar fricative

• voiceless palatal-velar fricative (articulation disputed)

Epiglottal fricatives

• voiceless epiglottal fricative

• voiced epiglottal fricative

Epiglottal fricatives have also been re-analyzed instead as pharyngeal trills.

Velopharyngeal fricatives

• in extIPA voiceless velopharyngeal fricative (often occurs with a cleft palate)

• in extIPA voiced velopharyngeal fricative

Lateral fricatives

• voiceless dental lateral fricative

• voiced dental lateral fricative

• voiceless alveolar lateral fricative

• voiced alveolar lateral fricative

• voiceless postalveolar lateral fricative (Mehri)

• voiced postalveolar lateral fricative

• or extIPA voiceless retroflex lateral fricative

• or extIPA Voiced retroflex lateral fricative (in Ao)

• or or extIPA voiceless palatal lateral fricative

• or extIPA voiced palatal lateral fricative (allophonic in Jebero)

• or extIPA voiceless velar lateral fricative

• or extIPA voiced velar lateral fricative

The lateral fricative occurs as the ll of Welsh, as in Lloyd, Llewelyn, and Machynlleth (, a town), as the unvoiced 'hl' and voiced 'dl' or 'dhl' in the several languages of Southern Africa (such as Xhosa and Zulu), and in Mongolian.

• or and voiceless lateral-median fricative (a laterally lisped or ) (Modern South Arabian)

• or and voiced lateral-median fricative (a laterally lisped or ) (Modern South Arabian)

Guttural fricatives

• voiceless uvular fricative

• voiced uvular fricative

• voiceless pharyngeal fricative

• voiced pharyngeal fricative

No language distinguishes fricatives from approximants at these places, so the same symbol is used for both (depending on the recognition of voiceless approximants for the voiceless fricatives). For the pharyngeals, approximants are generally more common than fricatives. A fricative realization may be specified by adding an uptack to the letters, , or conversely, a 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 generally understood to specifically refer to the fricatives.)

Glottal pseudo-fricatives

• voiceless glottal transition, as in English hat

• breathy-voiced glottal transition

In many languages, such as English or Korean, the glottal "fricatives" are unaccompanied phonation states of the glottis, without any accompanying manner, fricative or otherwise. They may be mistaken for real glottal constrictions in a number of languages, such as Finnish.

Aspirated fricatives

Fricatives are very commonly voiced, though cross-linguistically voiced fricatives are not nearly as common as tenuis ("plain") fricatives. Other phonations are common in languages that have those phonations in their stop consonants. However, phonemically aspirated fricatives are rare. contrasts with a tense, unaspirated in Korean; aspirated fricatives are also found in a few Sino-Tibetan languages, in some Oto-Manguean languages, in the Siouan language Ofo ( and ), and in the (central?) Chumash languages ( and ). The record may be Cone Tibetan, which has four contrastive aspirated fricatives: , , and .

Nasalized fricatives

Phonemically nasalized fricatives are rare. and Souletin Basque have . In Coatzospan Mixtec, appear allophonically before a nasal vowel, and in Igbo nasality is a feature of the syllable; when occur in nasal syllables they are themselves nasalized. A similar feature exists in Eperara, where is an allophone of in nasal syllables.

Table

Occurrence

Until its extinction, Ubykh may have been the language with the most fricatives (29, excluding ), some of which did not have dedicated symbols or diacritics in the IPA. This number actually outstrips the number of all consonants in English (which has 24 consonants). By contrast, approximately 8.7% of the world's languages have no phonemic fricatives at all. This is a typical feature of Australian Aboriginal languages, where the few fricatives that exist result from changes to plosivess or approximantss, but also occurs in some indigenous languages of New Guinea and South America that have especially small numbers of consonants. However, whereas is entirely unknown in indigenous Australian languages, most of the other languages without true fricatives do have in their consonant inventory.

Voicing contrasts in fricatives are largely confined to Europe, Africa, and Western Asia. Languages of South and East Asia, such as Mandarin Chinese, Korean, and the Austronesian languages, typically do not have such voiced fricatives as and , which are familiar to many European speakers. In some Dravidian languages they occur as allophones. These voiced fricatives are also relatively rare in indigenous languages of the Americas. Overall, voicing contrasts in fricatives are much rarer than in plosives, being found only in about a third of the world's languages as compared to 60 percent for plosive voicing contrasts.

About 15 percent of the world's languages, however, have unpaired voiced fricatives, i.e. a voiced fricative without a voiceless counterpart. Two-thirds of these, or 10 percent of all languages, have unpaired voiced fricatives but no voicing contrast between any fricative pair.

This phenomenon occurs because voiced fricatives have developed from lenition of plosives or fortition of approximants. This phenomenon of unpaired voiced fricatives is scattered throughout the world, but is confined to nonsibilant fricatives with the exception of a couple of languages that have but lack . (Relatedly, several languages have the voiced affricate but lack , and vice versa.) The fricatives that occur most often without a voiceless counterpart are – in order of ratio of unpaired occurrences to total occurrences – , , , and .

Acoustics

Fricatives appear in waveforms as somewhat random noise caused by the turbulent airflow, upon which a periodic pattern is overlaid if voiced. Fricatives produced in the front of the mouth tend to have energy concentration at higher frequencies than ones produced in the back. The centre of gravity (CoG), i.e. the average frequency in a spectrum weighted by the amplitude (also known as spectral mean), may be used to determine the place of articulation of a fricative relative to that of another.

See also

• Affricate

• Grooved fricative

• Apical consonant

• Hush consonant

• Laminal consonant

• List of phonetics topics

Notes

References

Sources

External links

• Fricatives in English