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Voice or voicing is a term used in phonetics and phonology to characterize speech sounds (usually consonants). Speech sounds can be described as either voiceless (otherwise known as unvoiced) or voiced. The term, however, is used to refer to two separate concepts:
Sonorants are sounds such as vowels and nasals that are voiced in most of the world's languages. However, in some languages sonorants may be voiceless, usually allophonically. For example, the Japanese word sukiyaki is pronounced [sɯ̥kijaki] and may sound like [skijaki] to an English speaker, but the lips can be seen to compress for the [ɯ̥].
Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds. It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel. For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced [s] when it follows a voiceless phoneme (cats), and [z] when it follows a voiced phoneme (dogs). [1]
Articulations like voiceless plosives have no acoustic source and are noticeable by their silence, but other voiceless sounds like fricatives create their own acoustic source regardless of phonation. Phonation is controlled by the muscles of the larynx, and languages make use of more acoustic detail than binary voicing.
Among widespread speech sounds in the world's languages, the upper pharynx produces a voiceless fricative and a voiced sound that ranges from fricative to (more commonly) approximant, . The epiglottal region produces the plosive as well as sounds that range from fricative to trill, and . Because the latter are most often trilled and rarely ...
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]
To give a further example, the system of Chomsky and Halle defines the class of voiceless stops by the specification of two binary features: [-continuant] and [-voice]. [3] Any sound with both the feature [-continuant] (not able to be pronounced continuously) and the feature [-voice] (not pronounced with vibration of the vocal cords) is ...