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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 , nasals like and , and liquids (laterals and rhotics) like and . This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents (stops, affricates and fricatives).

Wikidata facts

Subclass of
consonant
Show 1 more fact
different from
voiced consonant
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Encyclopedic overview

8 sections
Contents
  • Types
  • Voiceless
  • Glottalic
  • Examples
  • Sound changes
  • See also
  • References
  • Bibliography

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 , nasals like and , and liquids (laterals and rhotics) like and . This set of sounds contrasts with the obstruents (stops, affricates and fricatives).

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).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “sonorant” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.