Syllabic consonants

 

Nasals, /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/

/m/, /n/, and /ŋ/ are called nasals since the air moves through the nose instead of the mouth. With nasals, the tongue or lips block off the vocal tract so that air can’t go out through the mouth. Specifically, for /m/, the lips block the air, for /n/, the tongue at the alveolar ridge blocks the air, and for /ŋ/, the back of the tongue blocks air at the velum. The passage leading up into the nose opens by lowering the velum so that the air stream can go out through the nose. In other words, the air is released out through the nose. Nasals are voiced, as the vocal cords vibrate during the creation of the sound.

Syllabic consonants

In general, a syllable needs a vowel. However, some consonants can serve as syllables without a vowel. The kind of consonants that can form syllables on their own are called syllabic consonants or vocalic consonants. To be a syllabic consonant, a consonant should be able to be stretched out long so that it can carry its own vowel sound. Thus, consonants that belong to sonorants are good candidates. Glides, /w/ and /j/, however, cannot be syllabic, although sonorous, because they are too short to carry a vowel sound by themselves. If we try to pronounce a long /w/ or /j/, they become /u/ or /i/. But the remaining sonorants, that is, nasals /m/, /n/ and /ŋ/, and liquids, /l/ and /r/, can be stretched out, and thus can become syllabic consonants: “ummmm,” “unnnn,” “ung,” “ulll,” and “urrrr.” When these consonants become syllabic, we don’t add a vowel sound, and say only the consonant sounds. 

Linguists disagree on how to symbolize a syllabic consonant: should it be just a consonant, or a composite of an underlying schwa followed by the consonant. For example, “cycle” may be phonemized as either /saɪkl/ or /saɪkəl/. The symbol /ə/ preceding the consonant does not itself represent a vowel phoneme sound. It signifies instead that the following consonant is syllabic. But using a schwa symbol for both a true vowel sound and a syllabic consonant is confusing since clearly there is a difference in pronunciation. For example, consider “woman (wumuhn)” and “button.” In “Woman,” there clearly is a schwa in front of ‘n’ (/ˈwʊmən/). But in “button” there is no schwa: not button, but button . For this reason, In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), syllabic consonants are shown with the letter symbol for the phoneme with a special mark written below: e.g., /n̩, m̩, l̩, r̩/. In this book, we use a superscript schwa, if needed,  to indicate a syllabic consonant. So “cycle” is phonemized /saɪkəl/.

The syllabic /əl/ is often called the dark L, and the syllabic /ər/ is called the vocalic R. We use these names in this book. Vocalic R is the reason for the r-colored vowels of American English. Since British English is not rhotic, /r/ is not viewed as a syllabic consonant in British English. Also, linguists disagree on the phonetic environment (when and to what degree) for syllabic consonants. So in this book, we simply list cases where words are pronounced with syllabic consonants without generalizing into rules.