Portuguese Alphabet - Consonants

Consonants

• The phoneme transcribed here as /ʁ/ has various dialectal variants, of which the main are the alveolar trill in Portugal and Africa, and the voiceless uvular fricative or the voiceless glottal fricative, in Brazil. For further information, see Guttural r: Portuguese.

• The opposition between the four sibilants /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/ is neutralized at the end of syllables. In that position, they are alveolar in most of Brazil: /s/ occurs before voiceless consonants or at the end of an utterance, while /z/ occurs before voiced consonants: e.g. isto /ˈistu/, mesmo /ˈmezmu/. (This is like in English.) In most of Portugal, and in Rio de Janeiro, some southern regions, and some northeastern states of Brazil, syllable-final sibilants are postalveolar: the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/ occurs before a voiceless consonant or at the end of an utterance, while the voiced postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ occurs before a voiced consonant: isto /ˈiʃtu/, mesmo /ˈmeʒmu/.

• The traditional pronunciation of the letter x between vowels is /ʃ/, but in loanwords from Latin or Greek it may represent other sounds: /ks/ (the most common), /z/ (in words that begin with ex- or hex- followed by a vowel, and in compounds made from such words), or /s/ (in a very small number of words, such as trouxe and próximo). It is always pronounced /ʃ/ at the beginning of words and after consonants.