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A sonority hierarchy or sonority scale is a hierarchical ranking of speech sounds (or phones). Sonority is loosely defined as the loudness of speech sounds relative to other sounds of the same pitch, length and stress, [ 1 ] therefore sonority is often related to rankings for phones to their amplitude. [ 2 ]
The sonority values of segments are determined by a sonority hierarchy, though these differ to some extent from language to language. Typically they are vowel > glide > liquid > nasal > obstruent (or > fricative > plosive > click ).
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.
Sonority is a measure of the amplitude of a speech sound. The particular ranking of each speech sound by sonority, called the sonority hierarchy, is language-specific, but, in its broad lines, hardly varies from a language to another, [7] which means all languages form their syllables in approximately the same way with regards to sonority.
There are two main lenition pathways: opening and sonorization. In both cases, a stronger sound becomes a weaker one. Lenition can be seen as a movement on the sonority hierarchy from less sonorous to more sonorous, or on a strength hierarchy from stronger to weaker. In examples below, a greater-than sign indicates that one sound changes to ...
If the coda consists of a consonant cluster, the sonority typically decreases from first to last, as in the English word help. This is called the sonority hierarchy (or sonority scale). [24] English onset and coda clusters are therefore different. The onset /str/ in strengths does not appear as a coda in any English word.
In the sonority hierarchy, liquids are considered the most sonorous sounds after vowels and glides, [4] with laterals considered to be less sonorous than rhotics. [5] This explains why they are more likely to be part of consonant clusters than other consonants (excluding glides), and to follow obstruents in initial consonant clusters and ...
The phonological hierarchy describes a series of increasingly smaller regions of a phonological utterance, each nested within the next highest region. Different ...