Fricative Consonant - Languages

Languages

H is not a fricative in English (see /h/). The other fricatives come in voiceless-voiced pairs: /f v, θ ð, s z, ʃ ʒ/.

Ubykh may be the language with the most fricatives (29 not including /h/), some of which do not have good symbols or diacritics in the IPA. This number actually outstrips the number of all consonants in English (which has 24 consonants). By contrast, approximately 8.7% of the world's languages display no phonemic fricatives at all. This is a typical feature of Australian Aboriginal languages, where the few fricatives that exist result from changes to plosives or approximants, but also occurs in some indigenous languages of New Guinea and South America that have especially small numbers of consonants. However, whereas is entirely unknown in indigenous Australian languages, most of the other languages without true fricatives do have in their consonant inventory.

Voicing contrasts in fricatives are largely confined to Europe, Africa, and Western Asia. Languages of South and East Asia, such as the Dravidian and Austronesian languages, typically do not have such voiced fricatives as and, which are very familiar to European speakers. These voiced fricatives are also relatively rare in indigenous languages of the Americas. Overall, voicing contrasts in fricatives are much rarer than in plosives, being found only in about a third of the world's languages as compared to 60 percent for plosive voicing contrasts.

About 15 percent of the world's languages, however, have unpaired voiced fricatives, i.e., a voiced fricative without a voiceless counterpart. Two-thirds of these, or 10 percent of all languages, have unpaired voiced fricatives but no voicing contrast between any fricative pair.

This phenomenon occurs because voiced fricatives have developed from lenition of plosives or fortition of approximants. This phenomenon of unpaired voiced fricatives is scattered throughout the world, but is confined to nonsibilant fricatives with the exception of a couple of languages that have but lack . (Relatedly, several languages have the voiced affricate but lack .) The fricatives that occur most often without a voiceless counterpart are, in order of ratio of unpaired occurrences to total occurrences, and .