Voiceless retroflex fricative
Consonantal sound represented by ⟨ʂ⟩ in IPA / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʂ⟩ which is a Latin letter s combined with a retroflex hook. Like all the retroflex consonants, the IPA letter is formed by adding a rightward-pointing hook to the bottom of ⟨s⟩ (the letter used for the corresponding alveolar consonant). A distinction can be made between laminal, apical, and sub-apical articulations. Only one language, Toda, appears to have more than one voiceless retroflex sibilant, and it distinguishes subapical palatal from apical postalveolar retroflex sibilants; that is, both the tongue articulation and the place of contact on the roof of the mouth are different.
Voiceless retroflex fricative | |||
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ʂ | |||
| |||
IPA number | 136 | ||
Encoding | |||
Entity (decimal) | ʂ | ||
Unicode (hex) | U+0282 | ||
X-SAMPA | s` | ||
Sound | |||
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Some scholars also posit the voiceless retroflex approximant distinct from the fricative. The approximant may be represented in the IPA as ⟨ɻ̊⟩.