English Consonants

Consonant is a speech sound produced by completely or partly stopping the air being breathed out through the mouth.  (Hornby: Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary).

Consonant is a speech sound which is pronounced by stopping the air from flowing easily through the mouth, especially by closing the lips or touching the teeth with the tongue.  (Cambridge University Press. : Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary).

Thus, we can describe consonant as a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal track.

English consonants are described by the IPA (International Phonetics Alphabets) based on:

Manner of articulation;

Place of articulation; and

Voicing (voiced / voiceless).

A. Manner of Articulation:

Manner of articulation refers to how the air stream from the lungs is directed to the mouth and modified by the various structures to produce a consonant phoneme.

B. Place of Articulation:

Place of articulation refers to the places where the air stream from the lungs or the sound stream from the larynx is constricted (limited) by the articulators.

Additional Consonantal Articulation:

It will not be necessary to discuss all of the manners of articulation used in the various languages of the world—nor, for that matter, in English. But it might be useful to know the term, such as trill (sometimes called roll), tap (sometimes called flap).

 Trill (roll) is made by vibrating an articulator, or hitting it many times against something else. For example: /rr/).

Trill (roll) occurs in some forms of Scottish English in ‘latter’ [lætər] and ‘ladder’ [lædər]; Spanish in ‘pero’ [pero] ‘dog’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in Bahasa Indonesia.

Tap (flap) is made with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator (such as the tongue) is thrown against another. It is often just a very rapid articulation of a stop.

Tap (flap) usually occurs in Spanish (e.g. “pero” [peɾo] ‘but’), French (e.g. “rouge” [ʁuʒ] ‘red’), and Nigerian (e.g. “rockeez” [ɽɒki:z] ‘party’.

Retroflex, which is supposed as one of the places of articulation, is the sound produced at the tip of the tongue and the back of the alveolar ridge. Many speakers of English do not use retroflex sounds at all. But for some, retroflex sounds occur initially in words such as “rye”, “row”, and “ray”.

**Variations in words that can be described in terms of rules are called alterations.

C. Voicing:

The aspects of voicing are: voiced consonants (those created by the vibration of the vocal cords during production); and voiceless consonants (those created by the absence of vibration of the vocal cords during production).

**In the previous phonetic chart of the English consonants, where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a voiced consonant.

The Explanation of Consonants Presentation Format:

For the purposes of clarity and consistency of the parameters of consonant sounds, generally, it can be determined sequentially based on the three aspects of consonants:

Describe the sound based on the voicing;

Describe the sound based on the place of articulation; and

Describe the sound based on the manner of articulation.            

Thus, to make a sound parameter of /b/ for example, we can describe it as following: 

“/b/ is a voiced bilabial plosive sound”.

Thus, in the word “skinflint” below, the consonant descriptions can be shown as:

The Phonetic Transcriptions of the English Consonants in Words: