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A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus ( margins, which are most often ). In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. They can influence the Isochrony of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre; properties such as stress, tone and reduplication operate on syllables and their parts. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants.
Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable boundaries is native speaker intuition, but individuals sometimes disagree on them.
Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the city of Ur. This shift from to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing". (1990). 9780520074316, University of California Press; British Museum. ISBN 9780520074316
A word that consists of a single syllable (like English language dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic; also bisyllable and bisyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.
συλλαβή is a verbal noun from the verb συλλαμβάνω syllambánō, a compound of the preposition σύν sýn "with" and the verb λαμβάνω lambánō "take". The noun uses the root λαβ-, which appears in the aorist tense; the present tense stem λαμβάν- is formed by adding a nasal infix before the β b and a suffix -αν -an at the end.
In practice, however, IPA transcription is typically divided into words by spaces, and often these spaces are also understood to be syllable breaks. In addition, the stress mark is placed immediately before a stressed syllable, and when the stressed syllable is in the middle of a word, in practice, the stress mark also marks a syllable break, for example in the word "understood" (though the syllable boundary may still be explicitly marked with a full stop, e.g. ).
When a word space comes in the middle of a syllable (that is, when a syllable spans words), a tie bar can be used for liaison, as in the French combination les amis . The liaison tie is also used to join lexical words into phonological words, for example hot dog .
A Greek sigma, , is used as a wild card for 'syllable', and a dollar/peso sign, , marks a syllable boundary where the usual fullstop might be misunderstood. For example, is a pair of syllables, and is a syllable-final vowel.
The syllable is usually considered right-branching, i.e. nucleus and coda are grouped together as a "rime" and are only distinguished at the second level.
The nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. The onset is the sound or sounds occurring before the nucleus, and the coda (literally 'tail') is the sound or sounds that follow the nucleus. They are sometimes collectively known as the shell. The term rime covers the nucleus plus coda. In the one-syllable English word cat, the nucleus is a (the sound that can be shouted or sung on its own), the onset c, the coda t, and the rime at. This syllable can be abstracted as a consonant-vowel-consonant syllable, abbreviated CVC. Languages vary greatly in the restrictions on the sounds making up the onset, nucleus and coda of a syllable, according to what is termed a language's phonotactics.
Although every syllable has supra-segmental features, these are usually ignored if not semantically relevant, e.g. in .
In many languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, such as Chinese language, the syllable structure is expanded to include an additional, optional medial segment located between the onset (often termed the initial in this context) and the rime. The medial is normally a semivowel, but reconstructions of Old Chinese generally include liquid consonant medials ( in modern reconstructions, in older versions), and many reconstructions of Middle Chinese include a medial contrast between and , where the functions phonologically as a glide rather than as part of the nucleus. In addition, many reconstructions of both Old and Middle Chinese include complex medials such as , , and . The medial groups phonologically with the rime rather than the onset, and the combination of medial and rime is collectively known as the final.
Some linguists, especially when discussing the modern Chinese varieties, use the terms "final" and "rime" interchangeably. In historical Chinese phonology, however, the distinction between "final" (including the medial) and "rime" (not including the medial) is important in understanding the rime dictionaries and that form the primary sources for Middle Chinese, and as a result most authors distinguish the two according to the above definition.
There are many arguments for a hierarchical relationship, rather than a linear one, between the syllable constituents. One hierarchical model groups the syllable nucleus and coda into an intermediate level, the rime. The hierarchical model accounts for the role that the nucleus+ coda constituent plays in verse (i.e., Rhyme words such as cat and bat are formed by matching both the nucleus and coda, or the entire rime), and for the Syllable weight, which plays a role in phonological processes such as, for example, sound change in Old English scipu and wordu, where in a process called high vowel deletion (HVD), the nominative/accusative plural of single light-syllable roots (like "*scip-") got a "u" ending in OE, whereas heavy syllable roots (like "*word-") would not, giving "scip-u" but "word-∅".
The rime is usually the portion of a syllable from the first vowel to the end. For example, is the rime of all of the words at, sat, and flat. However, the nucleus does not necessarily need to be a vowel in some languages, such as English. For instance, the rime of the second syllables of the words bottle and fiddle is just , a liquid consonant.
Just as the rime branches into the nucleus and coda, the nucleus and coda may each branch into multiple . The limit for the number of phonemes which may be contained in each varies by language. For example, Japanese and most Sino-Tibetan languages do not have consonant clusters at the beginning or end of syllables, whereas many Eastern European languages can have more than two consonants at the beginning or end of the syllable. In English, the onset may have up to three consonants, and the coda four.
Rime and rhyme are variants of the same word, but the rarer form rime is sometimes used to mean specifically syllable rime to differentiate it from the concept of poetic rhyme. This distinction is not made by some linguists and does not appear in most dictionaries.
| + Examples C = consonant, V = vowel, optional components are in parentheses. ! structure: !! syllable = !! onset !! + rhyme |
In some languages, heavy syllables include both VV (branching nucleus) and VC (branching rime) syllables, contrasted with V, which is a light syllable. In other languages, only VV syllables are considered heavy, while both VC and V syllables are light. Some languages distinguish a third type of superheavy syllable, which consists of VVC syllables (with both a branching nucleus and rime) or VCC syllables (with a coda consisting of two or more consonants) or both.
In moraic theory, heavy syllables are said to have two moras, while light syllables are said to have one and superheavy syllables are said to have three. Japanese phonology is generally described this way.
Many languages forbid superheavy syllables, while a significant number forbid any heavy syllable. Some languages strive for constant syllable weight; for example, in stressed, non-final syllables in Italian language, short vowels co-occur with closed syllables while long vowels co-occur with open syllables, so that all such syllables are heavy (not light or superheavy).
The difference between heavy and light frequently determines which syllables receive stress – this is the case in Latin and Arabic language, for example. The system of poetic meter in many classical languages, such as Classical Greek, Classical Latin, Tamil language and Sanskrit, is based on syllable weight rather than stress (so-called quantitative rhythm or quantitative meter).
Phonotactic rules determine which sounds are allowed or disallowed in each part of the syllable. English language allows very complicated syllables; syllables may begin with up to three consonants (as in strength), and occasionally end with as many as four (as in angsts, pronounced æŋsts). Many other languages are much more restricted; Japanese, for example, only allows and a chroneme in a coda, and theoretically has no consonant clusters at all, as the onset is composed of at most one consonant.
The linking of a word-final consonant to a vowel beginning the word immediately following it forms a regular part of the phonetics of some languages, including Spanish, Hungarian, and Turkish. Thus, in Spanish, the phrase los hombres ('the men') is pronounced , Hungarian az ember ('the human') as , and Turkish nefret ettim ('I hated it') as . In Italian, a final sound can be moved to the next syllable in enchainement, sometimes with a gemination: e.g., non ne ho mai avuti ('I've never had any of them') is broken into syllables as and io ci vado e lei anche ('I go there and she does as well') is realized as . A related phenomenon, called consonant mutation, is found in the Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh, whereby unwritten (but historical) final consonants affect the initial consonant of the following word.
Onset clusters often follow the sonority principle, that is, onsets with increasing sonority (/kl/) are usually preferred to ones with a plateau (/ll/) and even stronger preferred to decreasing sonority (/lk/); however, many languages have counterexamples to this tendency.
This is less strange than it may appear at first, as most such languages allow syllables to begin with a phonemic glottal stop (the sound in the middle of English uh-oh or, in some dialects, the double T in button, represented in the IPA as ). In English, a word that begins with a vowel may be pronounced with an epenthesis glottal stop when following a pause, though the glottal stop may not be a phoneme in the language.
Few languages make a phonemic distinction between a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a glottal stop followed by a vowel, since the distinction will generally only be audible following another word. However, Maltese language and some Polynesian languages do make such a distinction, as in Hawaiian ('fire') and / ← ('tuna') and Maltese ← Arabic and Maltese ← Arabic .
Ashkenazi Hebrew and Sephardi Hebrew may commonly ignore א, ה and ע, and Arabic forbid empty onsets. The names Israel, Abel, Abraham, Omar, Abdullah, and Iraq appear not to have onsets in the first syllable, but in the original Hebrew and Arabic forms they actually begin with various consonants: the semivowel in יִשְׂרָאֵל , the glottal fricative in הֶבֶל , the glottal stop in אַבְרָהָם , or the pharyngeal fricative in عُمَر , عَبْدُ ٱللّٰ , and عِرَاق . Conversely, the Arrernte language of central Australia may prohibit onsets altogether; if so, all syllables have the underlying shape VC(C).
The difference between a syllable with a null onset and one beginning with a glottal stop is often purely a difference of phonology analysis, rather than the actual pronunciation of the syllable. In some cases, the pronunciation of a (putatively) vowel-initial word when following another word – particularly, whether or not a glottal stop is inserted – indicates whether the word should be considered to have a null onset. For example, many Romance languages such as Spanish language never insert such a glottal stop, while English language does so only some of the time, depending on factors such as conversation speed; in both cases, this suggests that the words in question are truly vowel-initial.
But there are exceptions here, too. For example, standard German language (excluding many southern accents) and Arabic language both require that a glottal stop be inserted between a word and a following, putatively vowel-initial word. Yet such words are perceived to begin with a vowel in German but a glottal stop in Arabic. The reason for this has to do with other properties of the two languages. For example, a glottal stop does not occur in other situations in German, e.g. before a consonant or at the end of word. On the other hand, in Arabic, not only does a glottal stop occur in such situations (e.g. Classical "he asked", "opinion", "light"), but it occurs in alternations that are clearly indicative of its phonemic status (cf. Classical "writer" vs. /mak "written", "eater" vs. "eaten"). In other words, while the glottal stop is predictable in German (inserted only if a stressed syllable would otherwise begin with a vowel), the same sound is a regular consonantal phoneme in Arabic. The status of this consonant in the respective writing systems corresponds to this difference: there is no reflex of the glottal stop in German orthography, but there is a letter in the Arabic alphabet (Hamza (ء)).
The writing system of a language may not correspond with the phonological analysis of the language in terms of its handling of (potentially) null onsets. For example, in some languages written in the Latin alphabet, an initial glottal stop is left unwritten (see the German example); on the other hand, some languages written using non-Latin alphabets such as and have a special zero consonant to represent a null onset. As an example, in Hangul, the alphabet of the Korean language, a null onset is represented with ㅇ at the left or top section of a grapheme, as in 역 "station", pronounced yeok, where the diphthong yeo is the nucleus and k is the coda.
| + Examples of syllable nuclei | |
| c at | |
| b ed | |
| ode | |
| b eet | |
| b ite | |
| r ain | |
| b itt en or | or |
The nucleus is usually the vowel in the middle of a syllable. Generally, every syllable requires a nucleus (sometimes called the peak), and the minimal syllable consists only of a nucleus, as in the English words "eye" or "owe". The syllable nucleus is usually a vowel, in the form of a monophthong, diphthong, or triphthong, but sometimes is a syllabic consonant.
It has been suggested that if a language allows a type of consonants to occur in syllable nucleus, it will also allow all the consonant types that are higher in sonority, that is, a language with syllabic fricatives would necessarily also have syllabic nasals, and that syllabic obstruents will be much more rare than liquids; both statements have been shown to be false.
In most Germanic languages, tenseness can occur only in closed syllables. Therefore, these vowels are also called checked vowels, as opposed to the tense vowels that are called free vowels because they can occur even in open syllables.
A few languages have so-called syllabic fricatives, also known as fricative vowels, at the phonemic level. (In the context of Chinese phonology, the related but non-synonymous term apical vowel is commonly used.) Mandarin Chinese allows such sounds in at least some of its dialects, for example the pinyin syllables sī shī rī, usually pronounced , respectively. Though, like the nucleus of rhotic English church, there is debate over whether these nuclei are consonants or vowels.
Languages of the northwest coast of North America, including Salishan, Wakashan and Chinookan languages, allow and voiceless fricatives as syllables at the phonemic level, in even the most careful enunciation. An example is Chinook 'those two women are coming this way out of the water'. Syllabic used to be considered very rare, but surveys have shown that they are relatively common and might even be more common than syllabic Liquid consonant.
Other examples:
In Bagemihl's survey of previous analyses, he finds that the Bella Coola word 'he arrived' would have been parsed into 0, 2, 3, 5, or 6 syllables depending on which analysis is used. One analysis would consider all vowel and consonant segments as syllable nuclei, another would consider only a small subset ( or ) as nuclei candidates, and another would simply deny the existence of syllables completely. However, when working with recordings rather than transcriptions, the syllables can be obvious in such languages, and native speakers have strong intuitions as to what the syllables are.
This type of phenomenon has also been reported in Berber languages (such as Indlawn Shilha language), Mon–Khmer languages (such as Semai language, Temiar language, Khmu language) and the Ōgami dialect of Miyako language, a Ryukyuan language. (2025). 9784863370722, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. . ISBN 9784863370722
Languages with long sequences of obstruents pose a problem to several models of the syllable.
The phonotactics of many languages forbid syllable codas. Examples are Swahili language and Hawaiian. In others, codas are restricted to a small subset of the consonants that appear in onset position. At a phonemic level in Japanese, for example, a coda may only be a nasal (homorganic with any following consonant) or, in the middle of a word, gemination of the following consonant. (On a phonetic level, other codas occur due to elision of /i/ and /u/.) In other languages, nearly any consonant allowed as an onset is also allowed in the coda, even clusters of consonants. In English, for example, all onset consonants except are allowed as syllable codas.
If the coda consists of a consonant cluster, the sonority typically decreases from first to last, as in the English word help. This is called the sonority hierarchy (or sonority scale). English onset and coda clusters are therefore different. The onset in strengths does not appear as a coda in any English word. However, some clusters do occur as both onsets and codas, such as in stardust. The sonority hierarchy is more strict in some languages and less strict in others.
When a syllable is not the last syllable in a word, the nucleus normally must be followed by two consonants in order for the syllable to be closed. This is because a single following consonant is typically considered the onset of the following syllable. For example, Spanish casar ("to marry") is composed of an open syllable followed by a closed syllable ( ca-sar), whereas cansar "to get tired" is composed of two closed syllables ( can-sar). When a Gemination (double) consonant occurs, the syllable boundary occurs in the middle, e.g. Italian panna "cream" ( pan-na); cf. Italian pane "bread" ( pa-ne).
English words may consist of a single closed syllable, with nucleus denoted by ν, and coda denoted by κ:
English words may also consist of a single open syllable, ending in a nucleus, without a coda:
A list of examples of syllable codas in English is found at English phonology#Coda.
Sometimes syllable length is also counted as a suprasegmental feature; for example, in some Germanic languages, long vowels may only exist with short consonants and vice versa. However, syllables can be analyzed as compositions of long and short phonemes, as in Finnish and Japanese, where consonant gemination and vowel length are independent.
The first syllable of a word is the initial syllable and the last syllable is the final syllable.
In languages accented on one of the last three syllables, the last syllable is called the ultima, the next-to-last is called the penult, and the third syllable from the end is called the antepenult. These terms come from Latin ultima "last", paenultima "almost last", and antepaenultima "before almost last".
In Ancient Greek, there are three Greek diacritics (acute, circumflex, and grave), and terms were used to describe words based on the position and type of accent. Some of these terms are used in the description of other languages.
Several asymmetries in onset and coda have been identified. All languages have syllables with onsets, but about 12.6% of languages in WALS do not allow codas. The list of consonants allowed in the coda is usually smaller than the ones allowed in the onset (e. g. in Northern Germany, coda cannot have voiced consonants). All combinations of onset and nucleus are usually allowed, but the coda consonant is sometimes restricted by the nucleus.
Consonant clusters are more typical in onsets than in codas.
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