Voiceless Sonorants
Whereas most obstruents are voiceless, the great majority of sonorants are voiced. It is certainly possible to make voiceless sonorants, but they occur as phonemic in only about 5 percent of the world's languages. These are almost exclusively found in the area around the Pacific Ocean from New Caledonia clockwise to South America and belong to a number of language families, among them Austronesian, Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene and Eskimo–Aleut. An example from a different part of the world is Welsh, which contains a phonemic voiceless alveolar trill /r̥/. In every case where a voiceless sonorant does occur, there is a contrasting voiced sonorant (i.e. whenever a language contains a phoneme such as /r̥/, it also contains a corresponding voiced phoneme, /r/ in this case).
Voiceless sonorants tend to be extremely quiet and very difficult to recognise even for those people whose language does contain them. They have a strong tendency to either revoice or undergo fortition, for example to form a fricative like /ç/ or /ɬ/.
Read more about this topic: Sonorant
Famous quotes containing the word voiceless:
“We have heard all of our lives how, after the Civil War was over, the South went back to straighten itself out and make a living again. It was for many years a voiceless part of the government. The balance of power moved away from it—to the north and the east. The problems of the north and the east became the big problem of the country and nobody paid much attention to the economic unbalance the South had left as its only choice.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)