The voiceless alveolar sibilant is a common consonant sound in vocal languages. It is the sound in English words such as sea and pass, and is represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet with ⟨s⟩. It has a characteristic high-pitched, highly perceptible hissing sound. For this reason, it is often used to get someone's attention, using a call often written as sssst! or psssst!.
The voiceless alveolar sibilant is one of the most common sounds cross-linguistically. If a language has fricatives, it will most likely have . However, some languages have a related sibilant sound, such as, but no . In addition, sibilants are absent from Australian Aboriginal languages, where fricatives are rare; even the few indigenous Australian languages that have developed fricatives do not have sibilants. Sibilants (or at least, sibilant fricatives) are also absent from the so-called ceceo Spanish dialects of southern Spain (Andalusia), where replaces all historical consonants.
Read more about Voiceless Alveolar Sibilant: Features, Comparison With The Spanish Apico-alveolar Sibilant, Occurrence
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)