Everything about Sonorant totally explained
In
phonetics and
phonology, a
sonorant is a
speech sound that's produced without turbulent airflow in the
vocal tract. Essentially this means a sound that's "squeezed out" (like /z/) or "spat out" (like /t/) isn't a sonorant. For example,
vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like /m/ and /l/. Other consonants, like /d/ or /s/, restrict the airflow enough to cause turbulence, and so are non-sonorant. In addition to vowels, phonetic categorizations of sounds that are considered sonorant include
approximants,
nasal consonants,
taps, and
trills. In the
sonority hierarchy, all sounds higher than
fricatives are sonorants. They can therefore form the
nucleus of a
syllable in languages that place that distinction at that level of sonority; see
Syllable for details.
Sonorants are those articulations in which there's only a partial closure or an unimpeded oral or nasal scape of air; such articulations, typically
voiced, and frequently
frictionless, without noise component, may share many
phonetic characteristics with
vowels.
The word
resonant is sometimes used for these non-turbulent sounds. In this case, the word
sonorant may be restricted to non-
vocoid resonants; that is, all of the above except vowels and
semivowels. However, this usage is becoming dated.
Sonorants contrast with
obstruents, which do cause turbulence in the vocal tract. Among consonants pronounced far back in the throat (
uvulars,
pharyngeals) the distinction between an
approximant and a voiced
fricative is so blurred that such sounds as
voiced uvular fricative ([ʁ]) and
voiced pharyngeal fricative ([ʕ]) often behave like sonorants. The pharyngeal consonant is also a semivowel corresponding to the vowel /a/.
Whereas most obstruents are
voiceless, the great majority of sonorants are voiced. It is certainly possible to make voiceless sonorants, but sonorants that are unvoiced occur in only about 5 percent of the world's languages. These are almost exclusively found in the area around the
Pacific Ocean from
New Caledonia clockwise to
South America and belong to a number of language families, among them
Austronesian,
Sino-Tibetan,
Na-Dene and
Eskimo-Aleut. It is notable that, in
every case where a voiceless sonorant
does occur, there's a contrasting voiced sonorant.
Voiceless sonorants tend to be extremely quiet and very difficult to recognise even for those people whose language does contain them. They have a strong tendency to either revoice or undergo
fortition to form for example a
fricative like ç or ɬ.
Sonorants in English
English has the following sonorant consonants: /l/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /ɹ/, /w/, /j/.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Sonorant'.
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