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Phonetic Terminology Guide

Place of Articulation – Along the top row in the consonant charts

Bilabial The sound is made by pressing both lips together, as in English /p/, /b/, and /m/. Labio-dental The top teeth meet the bottom lip, making sounds like English /f/ and /v/. Dental The tongue-tip is touching the back of the top-front teeth, as in French or Spanish /t/, /d/, /n/. Interdental The tongue is sticking out between the front teeth, like English 〈th〉 /ð/. Alveolar The tongue-tip is touching the ridge behind the top-front teeth, the usual place of articulation for English /t/, /d/, /n/. Lateral An “l” like sound – air is blowing around the edges of the tongue, while the middle of the tongue is blocking the flow, as in English /l/ and Welsh 〈ll〉. Palato-Alveolar The flat part of the tongue is touching behind the alveolar ridge, like English 〈sh〉, 〈ch〉, 〈j〉– /ʃ/, /ʧ/, /ʤ/. Palatal The flat part of the tongue is against the hard palate, creating a sort of “y” like flavour to the sound, as in English /y/, Italian /gl/, or Spanish /ñ/. Velar The back of the tongue is pushing up against the soft palate, like English /k/, /g/, and Scottish 〈ch〉 as in “loch”. Uvular The uvula is the hangy-bit at the back of the throat, try pushing the back of the tongue further than for /k/; this may feel uncomfortably like choking until you get used to it. Hebrew 〈ch〉 is usually uvular. Pharyngeal This sound is made by bringing the walls of the throat just below the tongue root and above the voice box closer together, it ends up sounding like a strong and raspy “h”. It occurs in Arabic, Maltese, Stoney, and some dialects of Breton. Glottal The glottis is the vocal cords/folds. English /h/ is glottal, as well as the break between the vowels in “uh-oh”. This break or glottal stop is very important in many languages, and must be regarded as a separate sound. Affricate When two sounds occur, one right after the other – stop then fricative (see below), it is an affricate. English 〈j〉 can be analysed as [d] + [ʒ], but it counts as a single sound for English grammar. Hungarian 〈c〉 is an affricate made up of [t] + [s]. English 〈ts〉 is not an affricate, because English grammar considers this two separate sounds. Rounded The lips are brought into a tight circle at the same time as the sound is articulated. Scottish 〈wh〉 could be considered a rounded /h/ (or a voiceless /w/), and English 〈qu〉 may be thought of as a rounded /k/.

Manner of Articulation etc. - Along the left side of the tables

Voiceless No vocal cord/fold vibration occurs during the sound, like French (or a softer version of English) /p/, /k/, /t/. Also like English /f/, /s/. Aspirated A voiceless sound with a strong puff of air (or /h/ sound) afterwards. As in English /p/, /k/, /t/ when these sounds occur at the begining of a word. Voiced The vocal cords/folds are vibrating, causing the individual sound of ones voice. Compare English /b/, /v/, /d/, /z/ with their voiceless counterparts. Ejective The glottis is closed during the production of the consonant, permitting no air to leave the lungs. The result is that the consonant as a glottal stop-like gap before and after the sound. Used to describe stops or affricates. Glottalised Ejective when referring to fricatives or resonants. Tense (Fortis) / Lax (Lenis) Tense and lax are somewhat arbitrarily used descriptions of sounds. Generally speaking, tense means the sound is pronounced with more constricted mouth and tongue muscles, lax more weakly constricted. For example, an English long /ā/ is tense, while the short /ĕ/ is lax (both are mid front vowels). Fortis and lenis are similar to tense and lax: Fortis is more a more strongly exploded sound, and lenis is weaker. English /t/ is fortis, while the French /t/ is lenis. These terms are useful as in some languages, the idea of voiceless and voiced are not entirely appropriate. So in Korean, 〈k〉 is a fortis-tense stop, 〈g〉 is a lenis-lax stop, and 〈kk〉 is a lenis-tense stop. In Korean, voicing of stops depends on the position of the sound in the word, not on an inherant quality of the consonant. Geminate The term used to describe long consonants. Compare English ‘good-day’ with ‘today’. In the first word, the /d/ is a geminate (held longer). Stop A sound which completely blocks of air through the mouth, such as English /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/. The first three are oral stops (or obstruents), the latter three are nasal stops. On these pages oral stops will be labelled simply as “Stop”, whereas nasal stops will be called “Nasals”. Nasal c.f. Stop Fricative The air is only partially blocked off, so that friction occurs, like English /f/, /s/, /h/. Lateral fricatives occur very commonly in North American languages, as in Welsh 〈ll〉. Approximate The air is even less restricted than a fricative, meaning the tongue is only shaping the mouth cavity to produce a sound. English /l/, /r/, /w/, and /y/ are approximates. Notice that there is a fine line between approximates and vowels, compare /y/ with /i/, as in “year”, and whether a sound is an approximate or a vowel often depends more on the phonological grammar of the language than the phonetics. Resonant A useful term which groups approximates, nasal stops, and other sounds which grammatically share characteristics.

Vowels

Supersegmentals – other stuff