Voicelessness
Voicelessness means making sounds without the vocal cords vibrating. It contrasts with voicing, where the cords do vibrate.
Most common voiceless sounds are p, t, k, f, and s, which pair with the voiced sounds b, d, g, v, and z. Some sounds can be marked as voiceless with diacritics, such as l̥ or n̥, even when their normal letter would be voiced.
Voiceless vowels exist in a few languages. They are not universal, but you can find them in some areas of the American Southwest and other regions. They can make a vowel sound without vocal cord vibration, which can be hard to hear for speakers of other languages.
Some languages also have voiceless versions of usually voiced sounds called sonorants, such as Tibetan l̥, Welsh m̥, n̥, ŋ̊, and r̥, or the Moksha j̊ with l̥ and r̥. Other languages have similar patterns with different sounds.
Many languages do not have a clear, separate voicing contrast for obstruents (stops, fricatives, and affricates). This is common in Australian languages, Mandarin, Korean, Danish, Estonian, and many Polynesian languages. In these languages, a sound can be voiced in some contexts (like between vowels) and voiceless in others, without creating a separate phonemic category.
Stops can behave differently across languages. In Polynesian languages, stops are often held longer and are rarely voiced. In some Australian languages, voicing may stop during the hold of a stop, or be absent altogether, so there are fewer truly voiceless consonants as a separate category. Sometimes ends of words are voiceless because the glottis is closed.
Voicelessness is a diverse, language-specific feature. It can affect consonants, vowels, and sound patterns, and the exact ways it works vary from language to language.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 23:50 (CET).