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Syllabic consonant

 

 
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Syllabic consonant
 
 
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A syllabic consonant is a consonant
Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper vocal tract, the upper vocal tract being defined as that part of the vocal tract that lies above the larynx....
 which either forms a syllable
Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Speech communication sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter....
 on its own, or is the nucleus of a syllable. The diacritic for this in the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
 is the under-stroke, , at Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 code point U+329. As with all IPA combining characters, the diacritic must be entered after the letter it modifies.

Examples from English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 are button
Button

In clothing and fashion design, a button is a small disc, typically round, object usually attached to an article of clothing in order to secure an opening, or for fashion....
 , bottle
Bottle

A bottle is a container with a neck that is narrower than the body and a "mouth." Bottles are often made of glass, clay, plastic or other impervious materials, and typically used to store liquids such as water, milk, soft drinks, beer, wine, cooking oil, medicine, shampoo, ink and chemicals....
 , and the suffix -ism
-ism

The Affix -ism denotes a distinctive system of beliefs, myth, doctrine or theory that guides a social movement, institution, Social class or group....
 . Note that all of these consonants are sonorant
Sonorant

In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. Essentially this means a sound that's "squeezed out" or "spat out" is not a sonorant....
s.






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A syllabic consonant is a consonant
Consonant

In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the upper vocal tract, the upper vocal tract being defined as that part of the vocal tract that lies above the larynx....
 which either forms a syllable
Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Speech communication sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter....
 on its own, or is the nucleus of a syllable. The diacritic for this in the International Phonetic Alphabet
International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic....
 is the under-stroke, , at Unicode
Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate Character expressed in most of the world's writing systems....
 code point U+329. As with all IPA combining characters, the diacritic must be entered after the letter it modifies.

Examples from English
English language

English is a West Germanic language that originated in Anglo-Saxon England and has lingua franca status in many parts of the world as a result of the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and that of the United States from the mid 20th century onwa...
 are button
Button

In clothing and fashion design, a button is a small disc, typically round, object usually attached to an article of clothing in order to secure an opening, or for fashion....
 , bottle
Bottle

A bottle is a container with a neck that is narrower than the body and a "mouth." Bottles are often made of glass, clay, plastic or other impervious materials, and typically used to store liquids such as water, milk, soft drinks, beer, wine, cooking oil, medicine, shampoo, ink and chemicals....
 , and the suffix -ism
-ism

The Affix -ism denotes a distinctive system of beliefs, myth, doctrine or theory that guides a social movement, institution, Social class or group....
 . Note that all of these consonants are sonorant
Sonorant

In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. Essentially this means a sound that's "squeezed out" or "spat out" is not a sonorant....
s. The only time obstruent
Obstruent

An obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing airflow, causing increased air pressure in the vocal tract. In phonetics, Manner of articulation may be divided into two large classes, obstruents and sonorants....
s are used syllabically in English is in onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is a word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing, such as animal noises like "oink" or "meow", or suggesting its source object, such as "boom", "zoom", "click", "bunk", "clang", "buzz", "zap", or "bang"....
, such as sh! (a command to be quiet), sss (the hiss of a snake), zzz (the sound of a bee buzzing or someone sleeping), and tsk tsk! (used to express disapproval or pity), though it's not certain how to define what a syllable is in such cases.

Sanskrit
Sanskrit

Sanskrit is a historical Indo-Aryan language, one of the liturgical languages of Hinduism and Buddhism, and one of the 22 official languages of India....
  [] (and Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit

Vedic Sanskrit is an Old Indic language. It is the language of the Vedas, the oldest shruti texts of Hinduism, compiled over the period of the mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BC....
  []) are syllabic consonants, allophones of consonantal and . This continues the reconstructed situation of Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the unattested, linguistic reconstruction common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans....
, where both nasals and liquids had syllabic allophones, .

The Czech
Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czech people worldwide....
 and Slovak
Slovak language

The Slovak language , sometimes incorrectly called ?Slovakian?, is an Indo-European languages that belongs to the West Slavic languages .The Czech and Slovak languages are Mutual intelligibility which means that even after the dissolution of Czechoslovakia Czech may be used in all official proceedings and documents in Slovakia, and vice ver...
 r and l may also be syllabic, as in the phrase - Strc prst skrz krk
Strc prst skrz krk

Strc prst skrz krk is a Czech language and Slovak language tongue-twister meaning "stick your finger down your throat".The sentence is well known for having a total absence of vowels....
 ("thrust the finger through the neck"). In addition, Slovak also has long versions of these syllabic consonants, r and l: klb (joint), vrba (willow)

There are "fricative vowels" in several languages, which are actually syllabic fricatives. In Mandarin Chinese these are written si , shi , ri . Standard Liangshan Yi
Yi language

Yi is a family of closely related tonal languages Tibeto-Burman languages spoken by the Yi people. Although linguists still use the term Lolo or Loloish, the Yi people themselves regard it as pejorative....
 has two "buzzed" vowels, written , which are also syllabic fricatives, , and may even be trilled .

Berber
Berber languages

The Berber languages are a group of closely related languages spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, as well as by Berber people communities in parts of Niger and Mali....
, Salish
Salishan languages

The Salishan languages are a group of languages of the Pacific Northwest . They are characterised by agglutinative and astonishing consonant clusters—for instance the Nux?lk language word meaning "he had had a bunchberry plant" has 13 consonants in a row with no vowels....
, and Wakashan languages
Wakashan languages

Wakashan is a family of languages spoken in British Columbia around and on Vancouver Island, and in the northwestern corner of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, on the south side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca....
 are sometimes used to illustrate syllabic obstruents in normal vocabulary, such as Bella Coola , "northeast wind", "seal blubber", "wet", "dry", or "we used to sing ". However, it is not clear how one would define a syllable or a syllabic nucleus in such cases, and it's therefore not clear whether any of these consonants should be considered syllabic.

See also

  • Semivowel
    Semivowel

    Semivowels, also known as glides or non-syllabic vowels, are vowels that form diphthongs with full syllable vowels. That is, they are vowel-like sounds that do not form the syllable nucleus of a syllable or mora ; they are not the most prominence part of the syllable....
  • R-colored vowel
    R-colored vowel

    In phonetics, vocalic r refers to the phenomenon of a rhotic segment such as or occurring as the syllable nucleus. This is a feature of a number of Slavic languages such as Czech language, Macedonian language and Serbo-Croatian language, as well as some western Bulgarian language dialects....