Approximant
Type of speech sound / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Central approximant?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
SHOW ALL QUESTIONS
This article is about the concept in linguistics. For the concept in mathematics, see Approximant (continued fraction).
Not to be confused with Approximate.
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough[1] nor with enough articulatory precision[2] to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence.[3] This class is composed of sounds like [ɹ] (as in rest) and semivowels like [j] and [w] (as in yes and west, respectively), as well as lateral approximants like [l] (as in less).[3]
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.