Sonorant

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In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are sonorants, as are semivowels like [j] and [w], nasals like [m] and [n], and liquids (laterals and rhotics) like [l] and [r]. Alternatively, sonorants may be defined as comprising nasals, approximants, and vibrants (thus explicitly excluding lateral fricatives). This set of sounds contrasts with obstruents (stops, affricates and fricatives). As a distinctive feature, sonorants are denoted as [+son]. For some authors, only the term resonant is used with this broader meaning, while sonorant is restricted to the consonantal subset—that is, nasals and liquids only, not vocoids (vowels and semivowels). Some authors have also noted that nasals are both partly sonorant and partly obstruent, as their nasal airflow is sonorous, but their oral airflow is...

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