pronounced as /notice/In Semitic linguistics, an emphatic consonant is an obstruent consonant which originally contrasted, and often still contrasts, with an analogous voiced or voiceless obstruent by means of a secondary articulation. In specific Semitic languages, the members of the emphatic series may be realized as uvularized, pharyngealized, velarized or ejective, or by plain voicing contrast; for instance, in Arabic, emphasis involves retraction of the dorsum (or root) of the tongue, which has variously been described as velarization or pharyngealization depending on where the locus of the retraction is assumed to be. The term is also used, to a lesser extent, to describe cognate series in other Afro-Asiatic languages, where they are typically realized as ejective, implosive or pharyngealized consonants.
In Semitic studies, emphatic consonants are commonly transcribed using the convention of placing a dot under the closest plain consonant in the Latin alphabet. However, exceptions exist: original emphatic developed into pronounced as /link/ in most Semitic languages; strictly speaking, it has thus ceased to be an emphatic version of and has become a different consonant, being most commonly transcribed as (rather than) accordingly.
Within Arabic, the emphatic consonants vary in phonetic realization from dialect to dialect, but are typically realized as pharyngealized consonants. In Ethiopian Semitic and Modern South Arabian languages, they are realized as ejective consonants. While these sounds do not necessarily share any particular phonetic properties in common, most historically derive from a common source.
Five such "emphatic" phonemes are reconstructed for Proto-Semitic:
| Proto-Semitic | Arabic | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phoneme description | IPA | Letter/phoneme name | IPA | |||||
| pronounced as /link/ | Hebrew: ט | ט | Arabic: ط | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
| pronounced as /link/ | Hebrew: צ | Arabic: ظ | pronounced as /link/ | or | ||||
| pronounced as /link//pronounced as /link/ | צ | Arabic: ص | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| pronounced as /link//pronounced as /link/ | ע | Arabic: ض | pronounced as /link/ | |||||
| pronounced as /link/ | Hebrew: ק | ק | Arabic: ق | pronounced as /link/ | ||||
An extra emphatic labial occurs in some Semitic languages, but it is unclear whether it was a phoneme in Proto-Semitic.
General Modern Israeli Hebrew and Maltese are notable exceptions among Semitic languages to the presence of emphatic consonants. In both languages, they have been lost under the influence of Indo-European languages (chiefly Yiddish and Sicilian, respectively, though other languages may also have had an influence; see revival of the Hebrew language).