Hissing sound
The term sibilant or sibilant describes a sound in phonetics that is accompanied by an audible whistle or hiss. Such a sound usually belongs to the fricatives .
articulation
The sibilant sound is generated when the mouth is in a position in which the air flowing out of the mouth has to pass a narrow place in front of or behind the teeth. It is a so-called fricative , which is formed on the tooth dam ( alveolar or retroflex ) or on the anterior palate ( palatal ).
However, the term sibilant is not a fixed definition. Depending on the pronunciation, the hissing is much less audible with the voiced sounds, so that these are sometimes not referred to as sibilants. In the case of people with tooth gaps, however, the whistling can sometimes be heard very clearly even with voiced sibilants.
List of sibilants
According to the International Phonetic Alphabet, there are the following sibilants:
- [ s ] voiceless alveolar fricative (as in Hau s )
- [ z ] voiced alveolar fricative (as described in Su s e)
- [ ɬ ] voiceless alveolar lateral fricative
- [ ɮ ] voiced alveolar lateral fricative
- [ ʃ ] voiceless fricative postalveolar (as in Sch ule)
- [ ʒ ] Voiced fricative postalveolar (as in Gara g e)
- [ ʂ ] voiceless retroflex fricative
- [ ʐ ] Voiced retroflex fricative
- [ ç ] voiceless palatal fricative (as in i ch , hence I-sound )
- [ ʝ ] voiced palatal fricative
Affricates
The combination of a plosive with a homorgan fricative creates a so-called affricate . The sibilants are in the narrower sense a subgroup of the fricatives, but since some of the affricates are now understood as separate phonemes , they also belong to the group of sibilants.
Such affricates include:
- [ ts ] (as in Z Aun, Ka tz e)
- [ dz ]
- [ tç ] (as in Mä dch en)
- [ tʃ ] (as described in Ma ch )
- [ dʒ ] (as described in Dsch ungel)
