Voiceless palatal implosive

A voiceless palatal implosive is a rare consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ʄ̊ or cʼ↓. A dedicated IPA letter, ƈ, was withdrawn in 1993.

Voiceless palatal implosive
ʄ̊
ƈ
cʼ↓

Features

Features of the voiceless palatal implosive:

  • Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
  • It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
  • It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.
  • The airstream mechanism is implosive (glottalic ingressive), which means it is produced by pulling air in by pumping the glottis downward. As it is voiceless, the glottis is completely closed, and there is no pulmonic airstream at all.

Occurrence

A rare and evidently unstable sound, /ʄ̊/ is attested from the Serer language of Senegal, and the dedicated letter is given for the language's Arabic script orthography, also found in Ngiti[1] and Lendu.[2]

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes
Lendu
Ngiti
Serer

See also

References

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