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In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. are sonorants, as are like and , like and , and like and . This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents (stop consonant, and ).Keith Brown & Jim Miller (2013) The Cambridge Dictionary of Linguistics
For some authors, only the term resonant is used with this broader meaning, while sonorant is restricted to the consonantal subset—that is, nasals and liquids only, not (vowels and semivowels).Ken Pike, Phonetics (1943:144). "The sonorants are nonvocoid resonants and comprise the lateral resonant orals and resonant nasals (e.g. m, n, and l)."
Sonorants contrast with obstruents, which do stop or cause turbulence in the airflow. The latter group includes and stop consonant (for example, and ).
Among consonants pronounced in the back of the mouth or in the throat, the distinction between an approximant and a voiced fricative is so blurred that no language is known to contrast them. Thus, uvular consonant, pharyngeal, and glottal fricatives never contrast with approximants.
In every case of a voiceless sonorant occurring, there is a contrasting voiced sonorant. In other words, whenever a language contains a phoneme such as , it also contains a corresponding voiced phoneme such as .
Voiceless sonorants are most common around the Pacific Ocean (in Oceania, East Asia, and North America and South America) and in certain language families (such as Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut).
One European language with voiceless sonorants is Welsh language. Its Welsh phonology contains a phonemic voiceless alveolar trill , along with three voiceless nasals: velar, alveolar and labial.
Another European language with voiceless sonorants is Icelandic, with l̥ for the corresponding voiced sonorants l.
Voiceless and possibly are hypothesized to have occurred in various dialects of Ancient Greek. The Attic Greek of the Classical Greece likely had as the regular allophone of at the beginning of words and possibly when it was doubled inside words. Hence, many English words from Ancient Greek roots have rh initially and rrh medially: rhetoric, diarrhea.
Old Irish had one of the most complex sonorant systems recorded in linguistics, with 12 coronal sonorants alone. Coronal laterals, nasal consonant, and rhotic consonant had a fortis–lenis and a palatalization contrast: . There were also and , making 16 sonorant phonemes in total.
In connected, continuous speech in North American English, and are usually Flapping to following sonorants, including vowels, when followed by a vowel or syllabic .
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