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In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and b, pronounced with the lips; and d, pronounced with the front of the tongue; and g, pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced throughout the vocal tract; , v, , and z pronounced by forcing air through a narrow channel (); and and , which have air flowing through the nose (nasal consonant). Most consonants are pulmonic, using air pressure from the lungs to generate a sound. Very few natural languages are non-pulmonic, making use of ejectives, implosives, and Click consonant. Contrasting with consonants are .
Since the number of speech sounds in the world's languages is much greater than the number of letters in any one alphabet, Linguistics have devised systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique and unambiguous symbol to each attested consonant. The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like , , , and are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled in "this" is a different consonant from the sound in "thin". (In the IPA, these are and , respectively.)
Dionysius Thrax, a Classical Greek grammarian, called consonants sýmphōna (σύμφωνα 'sounded with') because in Greek, they can only be pronounced with a vowel. He divides them into two subcategories: hēmíphōna (ἡμίφωνα 'half-sounded'), which are the , and áphōna (ἄφωνος 'unsounded'), which correspond to plosives.
This description does not apply to some languages, such as the Salishan languages, in which plosives may occur without vowels (see Nuxalk language), and the modern concept of "consonant" does not require co-occurrence with a vowel.
In English orthography, the letters H, R, W, Y and the digraph GH are used for both consonants and vowels. For instance, the letter Y stands for the consonant/semi-vowel in y oke , the vowel in my th , the vowel in funny, the diphthong in sk y , and forms several digraphs for other diphthongs, such as say , boy , key. Similarly, R commonly indicates or modifies a vowel in non-rhotic accents.
This article is concerned with consonant sounds, however they are written.
One blurry area is in segments variously called , semiconsonants, or glides. On one side, there are vowel-like segments that are not in themselves syllabic, but form as part of the syllable nucleus, as the i in English boil . On the other, there are that behave like consonants in forming onsets, but are articulated very much like vowels, as the y in English yes . Some phonologists model these as both being the underlying vowel , so that the English word bit would phoneme be , beet would be , and yield would be phonemically . Likewise, foot would be , food would be , wood would be , and wooed would be . However, there is a (perhaps allophonic) difference in articulation between these segments, with the in yes and yield and the of wooed having more constriction and a more definite place of articulation than the in boil or bit or the of foot.
The other problematic area is that of syllabic consonants, segments articulated as consonants but occupying the nucleus of a syllable. This may be the case for words such as church in rhotic dialects of English, although phoneticians differ in whether they consider this to be a syllabic consonant, , or a rhotic vowel, : Some distinguish an approximant that corresponds to a vowel , for rural as or ; others see these as a single phoneme, .
Other languages use fricative and often trilled segments as syllabic nuclei, as in Czech language and several languages in Democratic Republic of the Congo, and China, including Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, they are historically allophones of , and spelled that way in Pinyin. Ladefoged and Maddieson call these "fricative vowels" and say that "they can usually be thought of as syllabic fricatives that are allophones of vowels". That is, phonetically they are consonants, but phonemically they behave as vowels.
Many Slavic languages allow the trill and the lateral as syllabic nuclei (see Words without vowels). In languages like Nuxalk, it is difficult to know what the nucleus of a syllable is, or if all syllables even have nuclei. If the concept of 'syllable' applies in Nuxalk, there are syllabic consonants in words like (?) 'seal fat'. Miyako language in Japan is similar, with 'to build' and 'to pull'.
Each spoken consonant can be distinguished by several phonetic features:
All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop" . In this case, the airstream mechanism is omitted.
Some pairs of consonants like p::b, t::d are sometimes called fortis and lenis, but this is a phonology rather than phonetic distinction.
Consonants are scheduled by their features in a number of IPA charts:
The most universal consonants around the world (that is, the ones appearing in nearly all languages) are the three voiceless stops , , , and the two nasals , . However, even these common five are not completely universal. Several languages in the vicinity of the Sahara Desert, including Arabic language, lack . Several languages of North America, such as Mohawk language, lack both of the labials and . The Wichita language of Oklahoma and some West African languages, such as Ijo languages, lack the consonant on a phonemic level, but do use it phonetically, as an allophone of another consonant (of in the case of Ijo, and of in Wichita). A few languages on Bougainville Island and around Puget Sound, such as Makah language, lack both of the nasals and altogether, except in special speech registers such as baby-talk. The 'click language' Nǁng lacks , and colloquial Samoan language lacks both alveolars, and . Despite the 80-odd consonants of Ubykh language, it lacks the plain velar in native words, as do the related Adyghe language and Kabardian languages. But with a few striking exceptions, such as Xavante language and Tahitian—which have no dorsal consonants whatsoever—nearly all other languages have at least one velar consonant: most of the few languages that do not have a simple (that is, a sound that is generally pronounced ) have a consonant that is very similar. For instance, an areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical *k has become palatalized in many languages, so that Saanich language for example has and but no plain ;Ian Maddieson and Sandra Ferrari Disner, 1984, Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge University Press similarly, historical *k in the Northwest Caucasian languages became palatalized to in extinct Ubykh language and to in most Circassian dialects.Viacheslav A. Chirikba, 1996, Common West Caucasian: the reconstruction of its phonological system and parts of its lexicon and morphology, p. 192. Research School CNWS: Leiden.
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