Aspirated consonant

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents.

Voiceless aspiration occurs when the vocal folds remain open after a consonant is released.

For example, in Northern Sami, the unvoiced stop and affricate phonemes /p/, /t/, /ts/, /tʃ/, /k/ are pronounced preaspirated ([ʰp], [ʰt] [ʰts], [ʰtʃ], [ʰk]) in medial or final position.

Some languages, such as Choni Tibetan, have as many as four contrastive aspirated fricatives [sʰ] [ɕʰ], [ʂʰ] and [xʰ].

English voiceless stops are aspirated for most native speakers when they are word-initial or begin a stressed syllable.

Pronouncing them as unaspirated in these positions, as is done by many Indian English speakers, may make them get confused with the corresponding voiced stop by other English-speakers.

[citation needed] Conversely, this confusion does not happen with the native speakers of languages which have aspirated and unaspirated but not voiced stops, such as Mandarin Chinese.

Alemannic German dialects have unaspirated [p˭ t˭ k˭] as well as aspirated [pʰ tʰ kʰ]; the latter series are usually viewed as consonant clusters.

French,[6] Standard Dutch,[7] Afrikaans, Tamil, Finnish, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Latvian and Modern Greek are languages that do not have phonetic aspirated consonants.

Wu Chinese and Southern Min has a three-way distinction in stops and affricates: /p pʰ b/.

Muddy consonants as initial cause a syllable to be pronounced with low pitch or light (陽 yáng) tone.

Other languages such as Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada, have a distinction between voiced and voiceless, aspirated and unaspirated.

However, in all of these languages, aspirated consonant occur (mostly) in borrowed words, and commonly substituted with their unaspirated counterparts.

These series were called ψιλά, δασέα, μέσα (psilá, daséa, mésa) "smooth, rough, intermediate", respectively, by Koine Greek grammarians.

Cypriot Greek is notable for aspirating its inherited (and developed across word-boundaries) voiceless geminate stops, yielding the series /pʰː tʰː cʰː kʰː/.

[8] The term aspiration sometimes refers to the sound change of debuccalization, in which a consonant is lenited (weakened) to become a glottal stop or fricative [ʔ h ɦ].