In phonology, an allophone is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive and the aspirated form are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai. Similarly, in Spanish, and are allophones for the phoneme, while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English.
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
TaaTAH, also known as ǃXóõKOH, is a Tuu language notable for its large number of phonemes, perhaps the largest in the world. It is also notable for having perhaps the heaviest functional load of click consonants, with one count finding that 82% of basic vocabulary items started with a click. Most speakers live in Botswana, but a few hundred live in Namibia. The people call themselves ǃXoon or ʼNǀohan, depending on the dialect they speak. The Tuu languages are one of the three traditional language families that make up the Khoisan languages. In 2011, there were around 2,500 speakers of Taa.
Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds. Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless or voiced.
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. Vowels are sonorants, as are semivowels like and, nasal consonants like and, and liquid consonants like and. This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents.
ǂʼAmkoeAM-koy, formerly called by the dialectal name ǂHoan, is a severely endangered Kxʼa language of Botswana. West ǂʼAmkoe dialect, along with Taa and Gǀui, form the core of the Kalahari Basin sprachbund, and share a number of characteristic features, including the largest consonant inventories in the world. ǂʼAmkoe was shown to be related to the Juu languages by Honken and Heine (2010), and these have since been classified together in the Kxʼa language family.
Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can be modified by phonation. Contrastive implosives are found in approximately 13% of the world's languages.
Cypriot Arabic, also known as Cypriot Maronite Arabic or Sanna is a moribund variety of Arabic spoken by the Maronite community of Cyprus. Formerly speakers were mostly situated in Kormakitis, but following the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, the majority relocated to the south and dispersed, leading to the decline of the language. Traditionally bilingual in Cypriot Greek, as of some time prior to 2000, all remaining speakers of Cypriot Arabic were over 30 years of age. A 2011 census reported that, of the 3,656 Maronite Cypriots in Republic of Cyprus-controlled areas, none declared Cypriot Arabic as their first language.
The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective or otherwise non-pulmonic stops, *pʼ *tʼ *kʼ, instead of the plain voiced ones, *b *d *ɡ as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions.
Mlabri is a language spoken by the Mlabri people in the border area between Thailand and Laos.
The Sikkimese language, also called Sikkimese, Bhutia, or Drenjongké, Dranjoke, Denjongka, Denzongpeke and Denzongke, belongs to the Tibeto-Burman languages. It is spoken by the Bhutia in Sikkim, India, and in parts of Koshi, Nepal. It is the official language in Sikkim. The Sikkimese people refer to their own language as Drendzongké and their homeland as Drendzong. Up until 1975, Sikkimese was not a written language. After gaining Indian statehood, the language was introduced as a school subject in Sikkim and the written language was developed.
Kawaimina is a cluster of four languages and dialects of East Timor:
Waimoa or Waimaʼa is a language spoken by about 27,000 people in northeast East Timor. Waimoa proper is reported to be mutually intelligible with neighboring Kairui and Midiki, which together have about 5,000 speakers.
This article is about the sound system of the Navajo language. The phonology of Navajo is intimately connected to its morphology. For example, the entire range of contrastive consonants is found only at the beginning of word stems. In stem-final position and in prefixes, the number of contrasts is drastically reduced. Similarly, vowel contrasts found outside of the stem are significantly neutralized. For details about the morphology of Navajo, see Navajo grammar.
Hakha Chin, or Laiholh, is a Kuki-Chin language spoken by 446,264 people, mostly in Myanmar. In Mizoram, the language is recognized as Pawi. The total figure includes 2,000 Zokhua and 60,100 Hakha speakers. The speakers are largely concentrated in Chin State in western Myanmar and Mizoram in eastern India, with a small number of speakers in south-eastern Bangladesh.
Jalapa Mazatec is a Mazatecan language. An estimate from 1990 suggested it was spoken by 15,000 people, one-third of whom are monolingual, in 13 villages in the vicinity of the town of San Felipe Jalapa de Díaz in the Tuxtepec District of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. A 2016 study, published in 2019, estimated the Mazatec dialects to have 220,000 speakers. Egland (1978) found 73% intelligibility with Huautla, the prestige variety of Mazatec. Literacy in Jalapa is taught alongside Spanish in local schools.
Kelabit is one of the most remote languages of Borneo, on the Sarawak–North Kalimantan border. It is spoken by one of the smallest ethnicities in Borneo, the Kelabit people.
Yaqay is a Papuan language spoken in Indonesia by over 10,000 people. It is also called Mapi or Sohur; dialects are Oba-Miwamon, Nambiomon-Mabur, Bapai.
Pulmonic-contour clicks, also called sequential linguo-pulmonic consonants, are consonants that transition from a click to an ordinary pulmonic sound, or more precisely, have an audible delay between the front and rear release of the click. All click types have linguo-pulmonic variants, which occur as both stops and affricates, and are attested in four phonations: tenuis, voiced, aspirated, and murmured. At least a voiceless linguo-pulmonic affricate is attested from all Khoisan languages of southern Africa, as well as (reportedly) from the Bantu language Yeyi from the same area, but they are unattested elsewhere.
