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 pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/, nasals like pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/, and liquids (laterals and rhotics) like pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/. 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).[2]
Whereas obstruents are frequently voiceless, sonorants are almost always voiced. In the sonority hierarchy, all sounds higher than fricatives are sonorants. They can therefore form the nucleus of a syllable in languages that place that distinction at that level of sonority; see Syllable for details.
Sonorants contrast with obstruents, which do stop or cause turbulence in the airflow. The latter group includes fricatives and stops (for example, pronounced as //s// and pronounced as //t//).
Among consonants pronounced in the back of the mouth or in the throat, the distinction between an approximant and a voiced fricative is so blurred that no language is known to contrast them. Thus, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal fricatives never contrast with approximants.
Voiceless sonorants are rare; they occur as phonemes in only about 5% of the world's languages.[3] They tend to be extremely quiet and difficult to recognise, even for those people whose language has them.
In every case of a voiceless sonorant occurring, there is a contrasting voiced sonorant. In other words, whenever a language contains a phoneme such as pronounced as //ʍ//, it also contains a corresponding voiced phoneme such as pronounced as //w//.
Voiceless sonorants are most common around the Pacific Ocean (in Oceania, East Asia, and North and South America) and in certain language families (such as Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut).
One European language with voiceless sonorants is Welsh. Its phonology contains a phonemic voiceless alveolar trill pronounced as //r̥//, along with three voiceless nasals: bilabial, alveolar, and velar pronounced as //m̥ n̥ ŋ̊//.
Another European language with voiceless sonorants is Icelandic, with pronounced as /[l̥ r̥ m̥ n̥ ɲ̊ ŋ̊ ȷ̊]/ for the corresponding voiced sonorants pronounced as /[l r m n ɲ ŋ j]/.
Voiceless pronounced as /[r̥ l̥ ʍ]/ and possibly pronounced as /[m̥ n̥]/ are hypothesized to have occurred in various dialects of Ancient Greek. The Attic dialect of the Classical period likely had pronounced as /[r̥]/ as the regular allophone of pronounced as //r// at the beginning of words and possibly when it was doubled inside words. Hence, many English words from Ancient Greek roots have rh initially and rrh medially: rhetoric, diarrhea.
Voiceless vowels are allophonic in many languages, particularly when surrounding voiceless consonants, but their phonological status as contrastive phonemes lacks strong evidence; cases where they were previously reported to have contrastive status have failed corroboration in later studies.
Most sonorants have glottalized variants. In languages that use Latin scripts, they are often written with a modifier apostrophe, either preceding (ʼw), succeeding (wʼ), or above (w̓). Numerous studies have shown that the timing of glottalization for sonorants is fluid, and that they may be realized with:
For simplicity, the remainder of this section will transcribe these sounds with a preceding superscript glottal stop, as in pronounced as //ˀw//, but these transcriptions should not be assumed to be phonetically precise in describing the type of glottalization; they are merely representative.
It has been noted that glottal stops with palatalization and labialization, respectively pronounced as //ʔʲ// and pronounced as //ʔʷ//, are quite similar to the glottalized sonorants pronounced as //ˀj// and pronounced as //ˀw//, and either case may be analyzed instead as sequences, pronounced as //ʔj// and pronounced as //ʔw//; the specific interpretation of these sounds is mostly dependent upon how they pattern with other sounds within a particular language's phonological structure.[8] Some languages (such as Lillooet) may still contrast glottalized sonorants with glottal–sonorant or sonorant–glottal sequences.
Glottalized vowels occur in a variety of languages and are perhaps the most common examples of glottalized sonorants. For consonants, the most common examples cross-linguistically of glottalized sonorants are the aforementioned palatal and labiovelar semivowels pronounced as //ˀj// and pronounced as //ˀw//, the alveolar lateral pronounced as //ˀl//, and the bilabial and alveolar nasals pronounced as //ˀm// and pronounced as //ˀn//. Among others, they are particularly common in the Salish, Tsimshianic, and Wakashan language families of the Pacific Northwest, as well as several languages of the Atlantic–Congo family of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Kra–Dai family of mainland Southeast Asia and southern China.
Of the rarer glottalized sonorant consonants:
English has the following sonorant consonantal phonemes: pronounced as //l/, /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, /ɹ/, /w/, /j//.[9]
Old Irish had one of the most complex sonorant systems recorded in linguistics, with 12 coronal sonorants alone. Coronal laterals, nasals, and rhotics had both a fortis - lenis and a broad - slender contrast: pronounced as //Nˠ, nˠ, Nʲ, nʲ, Rˠ, rˠ, Rʲ, rʲ, Lˠ, lˠ, Lʲ, lʲ// (see). There were also pronounced as //ŋ, ŋʲ, m// and pronounced as //mʲ//, making 16 sonorant phonemes in total.[10]
Voiceless sonorants have a strong tendency to either revoice or undergo fortition, for example to form a fricative like pronounced as //ç// or pronounced as //ɬ//.
In connected, continuous speech in North American English, pronounced as //t// and pronounced as //d// are usually flapped to pronounced as /link/ following sonorants, including vowels, when followed by a vowel or syllabic pronounced as //l//.[11]
