Voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative

The voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative or laminal postalveolar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is s\.

Features

Features of the voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative:

Its manner of articulation is sibilant fricative, which means it is produced by directing air flow through a groove in the tongue at the place of articulation and directing it over the sharp edge of the teeth, causing high-frequency turbulence.
Its place of articulation is alveolo-palatal, that is, palatalized laminal postalveolar, which means it is articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge, and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate.
Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Occurs in

In some dialects of German, particularly those spoken in the Rhineland, the sound known by Germans as ich-Laut (in most dialects, a voiceless palatal fricative) is realized as . In those dialects, the voiced and voiceless alveolo-palatal fricatives are allophones.
In Japanese, assimilates when it is followed by or and is pronounced instead of . It is Romanized as shi, or less commonly, si.
In Mandarin, the Pinyin letter for is x. This sound is also found in the affricates j and q .
is a contrastive phoneme of Swedish and is realized as in almost all dialects except in Finland-Swedish, where it is mostly affricated as and is used as an allophone of . Example: ; ; "skirt"
In Polish, , written ś or si, is a phoneme different from both (s) and (sz). The affricate (ć respectively ci) also occurs in Polish.
In Ormuri, , written ݭ, contrasts with both (س) and (ش).

English

The voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative does not occur in English, and many English speakers have difficulty distinguishing it from or ^*. This can be seen, for example, in the realization by some English speakers of German ich (Standard German ) as , possibly influenced by dialects of German where the pronunciation is . Some English speakers, especially Americans, realize /s/ in front of /t/ as or something similar, for example in estimate.

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Features

Occurs in

English

See also