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The English alphabet has fewer consonant letters than the English language has consonant sounds, so digraphs like ch , sh , th , and ng are used to extend the alphabet, though some letters and digraphs represent more than one consonant. For example, the sound spelled th in "this" is a different consonant from the th sound in "thin".
This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents (stops, affricates and fricatives). [ 1 ] 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 vocoids (vowels and semivowels).
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
Speaking non-technically, the retroflex consonant [ʂ] sounds somewhat like a mixture between the regular English [ʃ] of "ship" and a strong American "r"; while the alveolo-palatal consonant [ɕ] sounds somewhat like a mixture of English [ʃ] of "ship" and the [sj] in the middle of "miss you".
Aperiodic sound sources are the turbulent noise of fricative consonants and the short-noise burst of plosive releases produced in the oral cavity. Voicing is a common period sound source in spoken language and is related to how closely the vocal cords are placed together. In English there are only two possibilities, voiced and unvoiced. Voicing ...
Coronals, previously called point-and-blade consonants, are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue.Among places of articulation, only the coronal consonants can be divided into as many articulation types: apical (using the tip of the tongue), laminal (using the blade of the tongue), domed (with the tongue bunched up), or subapical (using the underside of the tongue ...
The normal rhotic consonant (r-sound) in American English is a retroflex approximant [ɻ] (the equivalent in British English is a postalveolar approximant [ɹ]). Retroflex rhotics of various sorts, especially approximants and flaps occur commonly in the world's languages. Some languages also have retroflex trills.
This is a list of all the consonants which have a dedicated letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet, plus some of the consonants which require diacritics, ordered by place and manner of articulation.