Africative is aconsonantproduced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing twoarticulators close together.[1] These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of[f]; the back of the tongue against thesoft palate in the case ofGerman[x] (the final consonant ofBach); or the side of the tongue against themolars, in the case ofWelsh[ɬ] (appearing twice in the nameLlanelli). This turbulent airflow is calledfrication.[2]
A particular subset of fricatives are thesibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over the edge of the teeth.[1] English[s],[z],[ʃ], and[ʒ] are examples of sibilants.
The usage of two other terms is less standardized: "Spirant" is an older term for fricatives used by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists for non-sibilant fricatives.[3] "Strident" could mean just "sibilant", but some authors[who?] include alsolabiodental anduvular fricatives in the class.
Allsibilants arecoronal, but may bedental,alveolar,postalveolar, orpalatal (retroflex) within that range. However, at the postalveolar place of articulation, the tongue may take several shapes: domed,laminal, orapical, and each of these is given a separate symbol and a separate name. Prototypical retroflexes aresubapical and palatal, but they are usually written with the same symbol as the apical postalveolars. The alveolars and dentals may also be either apical or laminal, but this difference is indicated with diacritics rather than with separate symbols.
The lateral fricative occurs as thell ofWelsh, as inLloyd,Llewelyn, andMachynlleth ([maˈxənɬɛθ], a town), as the unvoiced 'hl' and voiced 'dl' or 'dhl' in the several languages of Southern Africa (such asXhosa andZulu), and in Mongolian.
No language distinguishes fricatives fromapproximants at these places, so the same symbol is used for both. For the pharyngeal, approximants are more numerous than fricatives. A fricative realization may be specified by adding theuptack to the letters,[χ̝,ʁ̝,ħ̝,ʕ̝]. Likewise, thedowntack may be added to specify an approximant realization,[χ̞,ʁ̞,ħ̞,ʕ̞].
(Thebilabial approximant anddental approximant do not have dedicated symbols either and are transcribed in a similar fashion:[β̞,ð̞]. However, the base letters are understood to specifically refer to the fricatives.)
In many languages, such as English or Korean, the glottal "fricatives" are unaccompaniedphonation states of the glottis, without any accompanyingmanner, fricative or otherwise. They may be mistaken for real glottal constrictions in a number of languages, such asFinnish.[6]
Fricatives are very commonly voiced, though cross-linguistically voiced fricatives are not nearly as common astenuis ("plain") fricatives. Otherphonations are common in languages that have those phonations in their stop consonants. However, phonemicallyaspirated fricatives are rare./s~sʰ/ contrasts with a tense, unaspirated/s͈/ inKorean; aspirated fricatives are also found in a fewSino-Tibetan languages, in someOto-Manguean languages, in the Siouan languageOfo (/sʰ/ and/fʰ/), and in the (central?)Chumash languages (/sʰ/ and/ʃʰ/). The record may beCone Tibetan, which has four contrastive aspirated fricatives:/sʰ//ɕʰ/,/ʂʰ/, and/xʰ/.[7]
Phonemicallynasalized fricatives are rare.Umbundu has/ṽ/ and Kwangali andSouletin Basque have/h̃/. InCoatzospan Mixtec,[β̃,ð̃,s̃,ʃ̃] appear allophonically before a nasal vowel, and in Igbo nasality is a feature of the syllable; when/fvszʃʒ/ occur in nasal syllables they are themselves nasalized.[8]
Until its extinction,Ubykh may have been the language with the most fricatives (29 not including/h/), some of which did not have dedicated symbols or diacritics in theIPA. This number actually outstrips the number of all consonants in English (which has 24 consonants). By contrast, approximately 8.7% of the world's languages have no phonemic fricatives at all.[9] This is a typical feature ofAustralian Aboriginal languages, where the few fricatives that exist result from changes toplosives orapproximants, but also occurs in some indigenous languages ofNew Guinea and South America that have especially small numbers of consonants. However, whereas[h] isentirely unknown in indigenous Australian languages, most of the other languages without true fricatives do have[h] in their consonant inventory.
Voicing contrasts in fricatives are largely confined to Europe, Africa, and Western Asia. Languages of South and East Asia, such asMandarin Chinese,Korean, and theAustronesian languages, typically do not have such voiced fricatives as[z] and[v], which are familiar to many European speakers. In someDravidian languages they occur as allophones. These voiced fricatives are also relatively rare in indigenous languages of the Americas. Overall, voicing contrasts in fricatives are much rarer than in plosives, being found only in about a third of the world's languages as compared to 60 percent for plosive voicing contrasts.[10]
About 15 percent of the world's languages, however, haveunpaired voiced fricatives, i.e. a voiced fricative without a voiceless counterpart. Two-thirds of these, or 10 percent of all languages, have unpaired voiced fricatives but no voicing contrast between any fricative pair.[11]
This phenomenon occurs because voiced fricatives have developed fromlenition of plosives orfortition of approximants. This phenomenon of unpaired voiced fricatives is scattered throughout the world, but is confined to nonsibilant fricatives with the exception of a couple of languages that have[ʒ] but lack[ʃ]. (Relatedly, several languages have thevoiced affricate[dʒ] but lack[tʃ], and vice versa.) The fricatives that occur most often without a voiceless counterpart are – in order of ratio of unpaired occurrences to total occurrences –[ʝ],[β],[ð],[ʁ] and[ɣ].
Fricatives appear inwaveforms as somewhat random noise caused by the turbulent airflow, upon which a periodic pattern is overlaid if voiced.[12] Fricatives produced in the front of the mouth tend to have energy concentration at higher frequencies than ones produced in the back.[13] The centre of gravity (CoG), i.e. the average frequency in a spectrum weighted by the amplitude (also known asspectral mean), may be used to determine the place of articulation of a fricative relative to that of another.[14]
^Maddieson, Ian. 2008. "Absence of Common Consonants". In: Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew S. & Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.)The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 18. Accessed on 2008-09-15.
^Maddieson, Ian. "Voicing in Plosives and Fricatives", in Martin Haspelmath et al. (eds.)The World Atlas of Language Structures, pp. 26–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.ISBN0-19-925591-1.
^Maddieson, Ian.Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge University Press, 1984.ISBN0-521-26536-3.
Laufer, Asher (1991), "Phonetic Representation: Glottal Fricatives",Journal of the International Phonetic Association,21 (2):91–93,doi:10.1017/S0025100300004448,S2CID145231104
