Place and Manner

Chapter 2 gave you the machinery. Now you can use it to name any consonant. A consonant is described by three facts, always in the same order: voicing, place, manner. This is how the IPA consonant chart is organised: place runs across the top, manner runs down the side, and voicing is shown by which of two neighbouring symbols you pick.

Manner of Articulation

Place (Chapter 2) says where the airway is narrowed. Manner says how: completely blocked, squeezed so that the air hisses, or only slightly narrowed. The definitions below follow Wikipedia's article on manner of articulation.

Subtypes worth knowing

• Sibilant: a fricative with a high-pitched, distinctive sound, such as [s] and [z].
• Semivowel (glide): an approximant pronounced like a vowel but with more stricture: [w] and [j].
• Lateral approximant: air flows through the sides of the tongue: [l].
• Liquids: lateral approximants and rhotics (r-sounds) together.

Putting Place and Manner Together

Combine the two and the English consonants fall into a grid. In each cell, the voiceless symbol comes first and the voiced one second. The symbols and example words come from Wikipedia's English-dialect consonant chart; the arrangement into place and manner is mine. Accent differences are noted below the table.

Example words (Wikipedia's chart): pin, but; ring [ŋ]; thing [θ] and this [ð]; she [ʃ] and pleasure [ʒ]; ham [h]; yes [j]; we [w].

Two placements are my own simplifications, so treat them as teaching approximations: [w] is made with the lips and also the back of the tongue (it is "labial-velar"), and [ɹ] is placed at the alveolar ridge here, but the source does not assign it to one place for every accent.

Accent differences the source mentions

• /t/ and /d/: a flap [ɾ] occurs in some positions in American and Australian English (better, daddy); a glottal stop [ʔ] occurs in some positions in Scottish Standard English, English English, American and Australian English.
• /r/: an alveolar trill occurs only in some varieties of Scottish, Welsh, Indian and South African English; taps occur in some Scottish, Irish, Indian, Welsh, Northern English and South African varieties.
• /l/: RP has clear [l] in onsets and dark [ɫ] in rimes; clear [l] does not occur in Australian, New Zealand, Scottish Standard or American English.
• [ʍ]: Scottish, Irish, and many southern US and New England dialects keep which distinct from witch.
• [x]: marginal in most accents (loch).

Obstruents and Sonorants

Phoneticians often sort manners into two big classes. Obstruents (stops, fricatives, affricates) involve substantial obstruction of the airflow and are prototypically voiceless, though voiced ones are very common. Sonorants (nasals, liquids, approximants, and vowels) lack that obstruction and are nearly always voiced; voiceless sonorants are uncommon. This is why the table above has pairs in the obstruent rows and single symbols in the nasal and approximant rows.

The same article describes a cline of stricture from greatest to least: stops, fricatives, approximants, tense vowels, lax vowels. Sounds can drift along it over time (towards less stricture, called lenition, or more, called fortition).

Reading a Label Backwards

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