Week 5: The Fricative Sounds

The Fricative Sounds

Fricatives in English are the most important group of consonants since we have 9 members in this group. These consonant phonemes are characterized by the friction they produce when the airstream is coming out of the mouth. It is the tongue and its several positions the one responsible in the production of all these sounds.

How can fricatives be described or defined? They are consonants produced by forcing the breath stream through a constriction by articulators in the vocal tract.

Fricatives are divided into 5 different sub-categories:

1. labiodental fricatives,

2. interdental fricatives,

3. alveolar fricatives,

4. palatal fricatives, and

5. a glottal fricative.

As can be noticed in the chart below, we have sister sounds, except for the glottal phoneme, which happens to be by itself.

This chart can also help us see the similarities and differences across the two languages we get to use at the university.

Phoneme	Spanish	English
/f/	voiceless-labiodental	voiceless-labiodental
/v/	(It doesn’t exist.)	voiced-labiodental
/ϴ/	(It doesn’t exist.)	voiceless-interdental
/ð/	(It is an allophone.)	voiced-interdental
/s/	voiceless-alveolar	voiceless-alveolar
/z/	(It doesn’t exist.)	voiced-alveolar
/ʃ/	(It doesn’t exist.)	voiceless-palatal
/ʒ/	(It doesn’t exist.)	voiced-palatal
/h/	voiceless-glottal	voiceless-glottal

As you may have noticed five of the fricative phonemes in English do not exist in Spanish spoken in the Americas. The other one exists in Spanish, but it is an allophonic difference for another phoneme.