Sibilant
The term sibilant or sibilant referred to in phonetics a sound that goes along with an audible whistling or hissing. Such a sound usually heard on the fricatives.
Articulation
The hissing sound is produced at a position of the mouth, in which the flowing out of the mouth air must pass through a narrow place before or behind the teeth. It involves a so-called fricative ( fricative ) of the alveolar ridge ( alveolar or retroflex ) or on the front palate ( palatal ) is formed.
However, the term sibilant is no fixed definition. Depending on the pronunciation is the hiss in the voiced sounds much less to hear, so that they are sometimes referred to as sibilance. People with missing teeth, however, the whistle is sometimes very clearly heard even when voiced sibilants.
List of sibilants
According to the International Phonetic Alphabet are the following sibilants:
- [s ] voiceless alveolar fricative (as in house )
- [z ] voiced alveolar fricative (as in Suse )
- [ ɬ ] voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
- [ ɮ ] Voiced alveolar lateral fricative
- [ ʃ ] voiceless postalveolar fricative (as in school)
- [ ʒ ] voiced postalveolar fricative (as in garage)
- [ ʂ ] voiceless retroflex fricative
- [ ʐ ] voiced retroflex fricative
- [ ç ] voiceless palatal fricative (as in I, hence I - Sound)
- [ ʝ ] voiced palatal fricative
Affricates
The combination of a plosive with a homorganic fricative gives rise to an affricate. The sibilants are in the strict sense, although a subset of fricatives, but since some of the affricates are now regarded as a separate phoneme, they also belong to the group of sibilance.
Such affricates are:
- [ ts ] (as in fence, cat)
- [ dz ]
- [TC ] (as in girl )
- [ tʃ ] (as in mud )
- [ dʒ ] (as in the jungle )