Types
Retroflex consonants, like other coronal consonants, come in several varieties, depending on the shape of the tongue. The tongue may be either flat or concave, or even with the tip curled back. The point of contact on the tongue may be with the tip (apical), with the blade (laminal), or with the underside of the tongue (subapical). The point of contact on the roof of the mouth may be with the alveolar ridge (alveolar), the area behind the alveolar ridge (postalveolar), or the hard palate (palatal). Finally, both sibilant (fricative or affricate) and nonsibilant (stop, nasal, lateral, rhotic) consonants can have a retroflex articulation.
The greatest variety of combinations occurs with sibilants, because for these, small changes in tongue shape and position cause significant changes in the resulting sound. Retroflex sounds in general have a duller, lower-pitched sound than other alveolar or postalveolar consonants, and especially the grooved alveolar sibilants. The farther back the point of contact with the roof of the mouth, the more concave is the shape of the tongue, and the duller (lower pitched) is the sound, with sub-apical consonants being the most extreme.
The main combinations normally observed are:
- Laminal post-alveolar, with a flat tongue. These occur, for example, in in Polish cz, sz, ż (rz), dż and Mandarin zh, ch, sh, r.
- Apical post-alveolar, with a somewhat concave tongue. These occur, for example, in Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages. (Hindi has no retroflex sibilants, although some of the other Indo-Aryan languages do.)
- Sub-apical palatal, with a highly concave tongue. These occur particularly in the Dravidian languages. These are the dullest and lowest-pitched type, and when following a vowel often add strong r-coloring to the vowel, sounding as if an American English r occurs between the vowel and consonant. These are not a place of articulation, as the IPA chart implies, but a shape of the tongue analogous to laminal and apical.
- Apical alveolar, with a somewhat concave tongue. These occur, for example, in peninsular Spanish and Basque. These sounds don't quite fit on the front-to-back, laminal-to-subapical continuum, with a relatively dull but higher pitched sound.
The sub-apical sounds are sometimes called "true retroflex" because of the curled-back shape of the tongue, while the other sounds sometimes go by other names. For example, Ladefoged and Maddieson prefer to call the laminal post-alveolar sounds "flat post-alveolar", and the apical alveolar sounds are often referred to simply as "apico-alveolar" (which is ambiguous with, and often confused with, other apical alveolar sounds such as the apical variety of the voiceless alveolar sibilant (English ).
Read more about this topic: Retroflex Consonant
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