Consonants are sounds made with constriction in the vocal tract and are represented by letters. English has 21 consonant letters, but more sounds. Consonants can be classified by vocal tract parts used. Linguists use the IPA to represent all possible consonantal sounds.
A consonant is a sound in speech characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract, such as the lips, tongue and teeth. The word “consonant” also refers to each letter that denotes this type of sound. This term comes from a Latin word and means ‘sound together’ or ‘sound with’ – the idea being that consonants generally don’t sound on their own but only occur with a neighboring vowel. For example, consonants typically cannot form words on their own, although some can act as vowels in certain words. The Latin meaning of this term, however, does not reflect a modern linguistic understanding, which defines them in terms of vocal tract constrictions.
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In the English alphabet, the 21 letters that typically denote consonant sounds are B, C, D, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, V, W, X, Y, and Z. The letter Y can also act as a vowel in words like “myth” and “proof.” In two English words, the letter W doubles as a vowel: “cwm” and “crwth,” with the sound being a long “u” sound. When a consonant letter serves as both a vowel and a consonant in a word and is its syllable, as in the word “prism,” it is called voiced. Some words that represent sounds may even consist entirely of consonants, such as “shh” and “brr.”
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Written English has fewer consonant letters than spoken English has consonant sounds – there are 24 common consonant sounds in English – so some letters represent more than one consonant sound. Pairs of letters such as “sh”, “th” and “ng” are used to represent some sounds. Some letters and letter combinations have different pronunciations in different words, such as the heavier “th” sound in “this,” versus the softer “th” sound in “thing.” Since the number of consonants in all the world’s languages is greater than the number of consonants in the various alphabets, linguists have created systems such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to assign a unique symbol to every possible consonantal sound.
Categories
Consonants can be classified according to the parts of the vocal tract used to produce the correct sound. For example, labial consonants are those that the lips use to produce the correct sound. Coronal and dorsal consonants use the front and middle parts of the tongue, respectively. Other types of consonants use parts such as the base of the tongue, teeth and vocal cords. There are also more specific sub-categories and some sounds use a combination of these parts.
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