Symbols in The IPA
The following table shows the types of sibilant fricatives defined in the International Phonetic Alphabet:
| Voiceless | Voiced | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| IPA | Description | Example | IPA | Description | Example | ||||||
| Language | Orthography | IPA | Meaning | Language | Orthography | IPA | Meaning | ||||
| voiceless alveolar sibilant | English | sip | sip | voiced alveolar sibilant | English | zip | zip | ||||
| voiceless alveolo-palatal sibilant | Mandarin | 小 (xiǎo) | small | voiced alveolo-palatal sibilant | Polish | zioło | herb | ||||
| voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant | English | shin | shin | voiced palato-alveolar sibilant | English | vision | vision | ||||
| voiceless retroflex sibilant | Mandarin | 上海 (Shànghǎi) | Shanghai | voiced retroflex sibilant | Russian Polish |
жаба żaba |
toad frog |
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Diacritics can be used for finer detail. For example, apical and laminal alveolars can be specified as vs ; a dental (or more likely denti-alveolar) sibilant as ; a palatalized alveolar as ; and a generic "retracted sibilant" as, a transcription frequently used for the sharper-quality types of retroflex consonants (e.g. the laminal "flat" type and the "apico-alveolar" type). There is no diacritic to denote the laminal "closed" articulation of palato-alveolars in the Northwest Caucasian languages, but they are sometimes provisionally transcribed as .
Read more about this topic: Sibilant
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