Implosives - Occurrence in Languages

Occurrence in Languages

Implosives are commonplace among the Sub-Saharan African languages, are widespread in Southeast Asia (e.g. Vietnamese), and are found in a few languages of the Amazon Basin. They are rarely reported elsewhere, but do occur in scattered languages such as the Mayan languages in North America, Saraiki Saraiki and Sindhi in the Indian subcontinent. They appear to be entirely absent from Europe and Australia, even from the exotic ceremonial language Damin, which uses every other possible airstream mechanism. However, fully voiced stops are often slightly implosive, although this is not always described explicitly when there is no contrast with modal-voiced plosives. This is found around the world, from Maidu to Thai to many Bantu languages, including Swahili.

Sindhi has an unusually large number of contrastive implosives, with /ɓ ᶑ ʄ ɠ/. Although Sindhi has a dental-retroflex distinction in its plosives, with /b d ɖ ɟ ɡ/, this contrast is neutralized in the implosives. A contrastive retroflex implosive /ᶑ / may however occur in Ngad'a, a language spoken in Flores, Indonesia.

For more examples please refer to the articles on the individual implosives.

Voiceless implosives are quite rare but are found in languages as varied as the Owere dialect of Igbo in Nigeria (/ƥ/ /ƭ/), Krongo in Sudan, the Uzere dialect of Isoko, the closely related Lendu and Ngiti languages in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Serer in Senegal (/ƥ ƭ ƈ/), and some dialects of the Poqomchi’ and Quiche languages in Guatemala (/ƥ ƭ/). Owere Igbo has a seven-way contrast among bilabial stops, /pʰ p ƥ bʱ b ɓ m/, and its alveolar stops are similar. It does not appear that the dorsal stops are attested in the literature as speech sounds, though /ʠ/ has been claimed for Kaqchikel. Some English speakers use a voiceless velar implosive to imitate the "glug-glug" sound of liquid being poured from a bottle, though others use a voiced implosive .

The rare imploded affricates occur in Kung-Ekoka and Hendo (a Bantu language). Several Central Sudanic languages, such as Mangbetu, have implosive labiodental fricatives, which are "strongly imploded, the lower lip briefly pulled back into the mouth".