pronounced as /non-pulmonic consonants/pronounced as /notice/In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some languages have glottalized sonorants with creaky voice that pattern with ejectives phonologically, and other languages have ejectives that pattern with implosives, which has led to phonologists positing a phonological class of glottalic consonants, which includes ejectives.
In producing an ejective, the stylohyoid muscle and digastric muscle contract, causing the hyoid bone and the connected glottis to raise, and the forward articulation (at the velum in the case of pronounced as /[kʼ]/) is held, raising air pressure greatly in the mouth so when the oral articulators separate, there is a dramatic burst of air. The Adam's apple may be seen moving when the sound is pronounced. In the languages in which they are more obvious, ejectives are often described as sounding like “spat” consonants, but ejectives are often quite weak. In some contexts and in some languages, they are easy to mistake for tenuis or even voiced stops.[1] These weakly ejective articulations are sometimes called intermediates in older American linguistic literature and are notated with different phonetic symbols: (IPA|C!) = strongly ejective, (IPA|Cʼ) = weakly ejective. Strong and weak ejectives have not been found to be contrastive in any natural language.
In strict, technical terms, ejectives are glottalic egressive consonants. The most common ejective is pronounced as /[kʼ]/ even if it is more difficult to produce than other ejectives like pronounced as /[tʼ]/ or pronounced as /[pʼ]/ because the auditory distinction between pronounced as /[kʼ]/ and pronounced as /[k]/ is greater than with other ejectives and voiceless consonants of the same place of articulation. In proportion to the frequency of uvular consonants, pronounced as /[qʼ]/ is even more common, as would be expected from the very small oral cavity used to pronounce a voiceless uvular stop. pronounced as /[pʼ]/, on the other hand, is quite rare. That is the opposite pattern to what is found in the implosive consonants, in which the bilabial is common and the velar is rare.
Ejective fricatives are rare for presumably the same reason: with the air escaping from the mouth while the pressure is being raised, like inflating a leaky bicycle tire, it is harder to distinguish the resulting sound as salient as a pronounced as /[kʼ]/.
Ejectives occur in about 20% of the world's languages. Ejectives that phonemically contrast with pulmonic consonants occur in about 15% of languages around the world. The occurrence of ejectives often correlates to languages in mountainous regions such as the Caucasus which forms an island of ejective languages. They are also found frequently in the East African Rift and the South African Plateau (see Geography of Africa). In the Americas, they are extremely common in the North American Cordillera. They also frequently occur throughout the Andes and Maya Mountains. Elsewhere, they are rare.
Language families that distinguish ejective consonants include:
According to the glottalic theory, the Proto-Indo-European language had a series of ejectives (or, in some versions, implosives), but no extant Indo-European language has retained them. Ejectives are found today in Ossetian and some Armenian dialects only because of influence of the nearby Northeast Caucasian and/or Kartvelian language families.
It had once been predicted that ejectives and implosives would not be found in the same language but both have been found phonemically at several points of articulation in Nilo-Saharan languages (Gumuz, Me'en, and T'wampa), Mayan language (Yucatec), Salishan (Lushootseed), and the Oto-Manguean Mazahua. Nguni languages, such as Zulu have an implosive b alongside a series of allophonically ejective stops. Dahalo of Kenya, has ejectives, implosives, and click consonants.
Non-contrastively, ejectives are found in many varieties of British English, usually replacing word-final fortis plosives in utterance-final or emphatic contexts.[2] [3] [4]
Almost all ejective consonants in the world's languages are stops or affricates, and all ejective consonants are obstruents. pronounced as /[kʼ]/ is the most common ejective, and pronounced as /[qʼ]/ is common among languages with uvulars, pronounced as /[tʼ]/ less so, and pronounced as /[pʼ]/ is uncommon. Among affricates, pronounced as /[tsʼ], [tʃʼ], [tɬʼ]/ are all quite common, and pronounced as /[kxʼ]/ and pronounced as /[ʈʂʼ]/ are not unusual (pronounced as /[kxʼ]/ is particularly common among the Khoisan languages, where it is the ejective equivalent of pronounced as //k//).
| Bilabial | Labio- dental | Linguo- labial | Dental | Alveolar | Labial- alveolar | Post- alveolar | Retroflex | Alveolo- palatal | Palatal | Velar | Labial - velar | Uvular | Epi- glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop (voiced) | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /pronounced as /link/ / | pronounced as /pronounced as /link/ / | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||
| Affricate (voiced) | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /pronounced as /link/ / | pronounced as /pronounced as /link/ / | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /ink/ | pronounced as /pronounced as /link/ / | pronounced as /pronounced as /link/ / | |||||||
| Fricative | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /link/ | ||||||
| Lateral affricate | pronounced as /link/ | pronounced as /ink/ (pronounced as /cʎ̝̊ʼ/) | pronounced as /ink/ (pronounced as /kʟ̝̊ʼ/) | ||||||||||||
| Lateral fricative | pronounced as /ink/ | ||||||||||||||
| Trill | (theoretical) | ||||||||||||||
| Nasal | (theoretical) | ||||||||||||||
A few languages have ejective fricatives. In some dialects of Hausa, the standard affricate pronounced as /[tsʼ]/ is a fricative pronounced as /[sʼ]/; Ubykh (Northwest Caucasian, now extinct) had an ejective lateral fricative pronounced as /[ɬʼ]/; and the related Kabardian also has ejective labiodental and alveolopalatal fricatives, pronounced as /[fʼ], [ʃʼ], and [ɬʼ]/. Tlingit is an extreme case, with ejective alveolar, lateral, velar, and uvular fricatives, pronounced as /[sʼ], [ɬʼ], [xʼ], [xʷʼ], [χʼ], [χʷʼ]/; it may be the only language with the last type. Upper Necaxa Totonac is unusual and perhaps unique in that it has ejective fricatives (alveolar, lateral, and postalveolar pronounced as /[sʼ], [ʃʼ], [ɬʼ]/) but lacks any ejective stop or affricate (Beck 2006). Other languages with ejective fricatives are Yuchi, which some sources analyze as having pronounced as /[ɸʼ], [sʼ], [ʃʼ], and [ɬʼ]/ (but not the analysis of the Wikipedia article), Keres dialects, with pronounced as /[sʼ], [ʂʼ] and [ɕʼ]/, and Lakota, with pronounced as /[sʼ], [ʃʼ], and [xʼ]/ . Amharic is interpreted by many as having an ejective fricative pronounced as /[sʼ]/, at least historically, but it has been also analyzed as now being a sociolinguistic variant (Takkele Taddese 1992).
An ejective retroflex stop pronounced as /[ʈʼ]/ is rare. It has been reported from Yawelmani and other Yokuts languages, Tolowa, and Gwich'in.
Because the complete closing of the glottis required to form an ejective makes voicing impossible, the allophonic voicing of ejective phonemes causes them to lose their glottalization; this occurs in Blin (modal voice) and Kabardian (creaky voice). A similar historical sound change also occurred in Veinakh and Lezgic in the Caucasus, and it has been postulated by the glottalic theory for Indo-European.[1] Some Khoisan languages have voiced ejective stops and voiced ejective clicks; however, they actually contain mixed voicing, and the ejective release is voiceless.
s aren't attested in any language, even allophonically. An ejective pronounced as /[rʼ]/ would necessarily be voiceless,[6] but the vibration of the trill, combined with a lack of the intense voiceless airflow of pronounced as /[r̥]/, gives an impression like that of voicing. Similarly, ejective nasals such as pronounced as /[mʼ, nʼ, ŋʼ]/ (also necessarily voiceless) are possible.[7] [8] (An apostrophe is commonly seen with r, l and nasals, but that is Americanist phonetic notation for a glottalized consonant and does not indicate an ejective.)
Other ejective sonorants are not known to occur. When sonorants are transcribed with an apostrophe in the literature as if they were ejective, they actually involve a different airstream mechanism: they are glottalized consonants and vowels whose glottalization partially or fully interrupts an otherwise normal voiced pulmonic airstream, somewhat like English uh-uh (either vocalic or nasal) pronounced as a single sound. Often the constriction of the larynx causes it to rise in the vocal tract, but this is individual variation and not the initiator of the airflow. Such sounds generally remain voiced.[9]
Yeyi has a set of prenasalized ejectives like /ⁿtʼ, ᵑkʼ, ⁿtsʼ/.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, ejectives are indicated with a "modifier letter apostrophe" (ʼ), as in this article. A reversed apostrophe is sometimes used to represent light aspiration, as in Armenian linguistics (IPA|pʼ tʼ kʼ); this usage is obsolete in the IPA. In other transcription traditions (such as many romanisations of Russian, where it is transliterating the soft sign), the apostrophe represents palatalization: (IPA|pʼ) = IPA (IPA|pʲ). In some Americanist traditions, an apostrophe indicates weak ejection and an exclamation mark strong ejection: (IPA|k̓, k!). In the IPA, the distinction might be written (IPA|kʼ, kʼʼ), but it seems that no language distinguishes degrees of ejection. Transcriptions of the Caucasian languages often utilize combining dots above or below a letter to indicate an ejective.
In alphabets using the Latin script, an IPA-like apostrophe for ejective consonants is common. However, there are other conventions. In Hausa, the hooked letter ƙ is used for pronounced as //kʼ//. In Zulu and Xhosa, whose ejection is variable between speakers, plain consonant letters are used: p t k ts tsh kr for pronounced as //pʼ tʼ kʼ tsʼ tʃʼ kxʼ//. In some conventions for Haida and Hadza, double letters are used: tt kk qq ttl tts for pronounced as //tʼ kʼ qʼ tɬʼ tsʼ// (Haida) and zz jj dl gg for pronounced as /1=/tsʼ tʃʼ cʼ kxʼ// (Hadza).
pronounced as /[ʘqʼ ǀqʼ ǁqʼ ǃqʼ ǂqʼ]/
pronounced as /[ʘ̬qʼ ǀ̬qʼ ǁ̬qʼ ǃ̬qʼ ǂ̬qʼ]/
pronounced as /[ʘqχʼ ǀqχʼ ǁqχʼ ǃqχʼ ǂqχʼ]/ ~ pronounced as /ʘkxʼ ǀkxʼ ǁkxʼ ǃkxʼ ǂkxʼ/ ~ pronounced as /ʘkʼ ǀkʼ ǁkʼ ǃkʼ ǂkʼ/
pronounced as /[ʘ̬qχʼ ǀ̬qχʼ ǁ̬qχʼ ǃ̬qχʼ ǂ̬qχʼ]/ ~ pronounced as /ʘ̬kxʼ ǀ̬kxʼ ǁ̬kxʼ ǃ̬kxʼ ǂ̬kxʼ/ ~ pronounced as /ʘ̬kʼ ǀ̬kʼ ǁ̬kʼ ǃ̬kʼ ǂ̬kʼ/
A pattern can be observed wherein ejectives correlate geographically with mountainous regions. argues that the geographic correlation between languages with ejectives and mountainous terrains is because of decreased air pressure making ejectives easier to produce, as well as the way ejectives help to reduce water vapor loss. The argument has been criticized as being based on a spurious correlation.
pronounced as /navigation/