Consonants

Consonants

The following table shows the consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English. When consonants appear in pairs, fortis consonants (i.e. aspirated or voiceless) appear on the left and lenis consonants (i.e. lightly voiced or voiced) appear on the right:

Consonant phonemes of English
	Bilabial	Labio- dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post- alveolar2	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal1	m			n			ŋ
Plosive	p  b			t  d			k  ɡ
Affricate					tʃ  dʒ
Fricative		f  v	θ  ð	s  z	ʃ  ʒ		(x)3	h
Approximant				r1, 4		j	(ʍ)3  w 2
Lateral				l1, 5

1.   Nasals and liquids may be syllabic in unstressed syllables.

2.   Postalveolar consonants are usually labialized (e.g. [ʃʷ] though this is rarely transcribed).

3.   The voiceless velar fricative and voiceless labiovelar approximant are dialectal with the former occurring largely in Scottish English and the latter being retained in much of the American South and Scottish English. In other dialects, words with these sounds are pronounced with /k/ and /w/ respectively.

4.   Depending on dialect, /r/ may be an alveolar, a postalveolar, a retroflex approximant or a labio-dental approximant.

5.   /l/ is velarized in the syllable coda

/p/	pit	/b/	bit
/t/	tin	/d/	din
/k/	cut	/ɡ/	gut
/tʃ/	cheap	/dʒ/	jeep
/m/	map	/n/	nap	/ŋ/	bang
/f/	fat	/v/	vat
/θ/	thin	/ð/	then
/s/	sap	/z/	zap
/ʃ/	she	/ʒ/	measure
/h/	ham
/x/	loch
/ʍ/	whine (also transcribed /hw/)	/w/	we
/ɹ/	run (also transcribed /r/ or /ɻ/)	/l/	left
/j/	yes