Chapter Consonant Inventoriesby Ian Maddieson (http://wals.info/author/maddiesoni) cite

1. IntroductionThis chapter and the next few chapters will look at various aspects ofthe complexity of the sound resources used in the world’s languagesand examine how this complexity is distributed geographically. Thefirst aspect to be examined is the size of the set of consonants usedin the language, usually referred to as the consonant inventory.This is one element of what is called the phonology of the language.

Values of Map 1A. Consonant Inventories

Go to map (http://wals.info/feature/1A)

Value Representation

Small 89

Moderately small 122

Average 201

Moderately large 94

Large 57

Total: 563

It is usually possible to agree for any given language on a set ofelements which are considered to be the speech sounds used inthat language. The most important consideration in deciding on thisset is to find groups of words which sound different from each otherby the smallest degree sufficient to make them distinct words of thelanguage. For example, the English(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng) one­syllable words pin,tin, kin, fin, thin, sin, shin are part of a set which differ by beginning indifferent ways, dim, din, ding, did, dig, dish are part of a set whichdiffer by ending in different ways and pin, pen, pan, pun, pain, pine,

Related map(s)

Consonant Inventories(http://wals.info/feature/1A)

CommentsBy: Luca Nobile(http://blog.wals.info/consonant­inventories/comment­page­1/#comment­52369)Wed, 14 Sep 2011 03:42:07 ­0700

The présentation of datacould be more clear puttingthe average number ofconsonants in the legenda,near to the number of ...

By: Martin Haspelmath(http://blog.wals.info/consonant­inventories/comment­page­1/#comment­12)Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:48:54 ­0700

Yes, this is an error that willbe corrected in the 2009version of WALS Online.

By: Oliver Lenz(http://blog.wals.info/consonant­inventories/comment­page­1/#comment­10)Sun, 04 May 2008 12:37:39 ­0700

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pawn are part of a set which differ in the middle of the syllable. Froma series of such comparisons a list of candidate speech sounds forthe language will emerge. Generally the set of those which canappear at the beginnings and ends of syllables will be unlike thosewhich can occur in the middle, hence a distinction is made betweenconsonants (sounds typically occurring at the syllable margins) andvowels (sounds typically occurring in the syllable centers). In thischapter only consonants will be discussed.

Several further decisions must be made, such as which consonants indifferent positions should be considered to be the same as eachother. For example, speakers of English(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng) generally consider thatwords such as pip, tit, kick, bib, did, gig begin and end with the sameconsonant even though there are some easily recognizabledifferences between the sounds at the beginning and those at theend. It is also necessary to resolve questions about whether certainbeginnings or endings of syllables should be considered to be onesound or a sequence of two or more sounds when analyzed from thepoint of view of the structure of the particular language. For example,the English (http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng) word chipbegins in a way that is similar to the beginning of tip followed by thebeginning of ship (compare saying grey chip and great ship), and theEnglish (http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng) word quickbegins in a way that is similar to the beginning of kick followed by thebeginning of wick (compare saying lie quick and like wick). Thesesyllable beginnings would both be noted in a phonetic transcriptionwith two symbols, as /tʃ/ and /kw/ respectively. However, when weconsider the possibilities of finding related sequences in English(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng), a difference betweenthe two becomes apparent. Nothing except /t/ can precede /ʃ/ at thebeginning of an English (http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng)syllable, whereas other sounds can precede /w/, as in twin, swim,dwell, thwart. Also several other sounds can follow /k/, as in click,crick, suggesting that /k/ and /w/ in the /kw/ sequence areindependent elements. Although words like trip, twin might suggestindependence of the parts /t/ and /ʃ/ in chip, the sequences /tw, tr/ arenot similar to /tʃ/ in an important way. This is because no English(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng) syllable can end with/tw, tr/ (or with /kw, kl, kr/), whereas syllables can end with /tʃ/, as inrich, pitch, kitsch. These considerations suggest that /tʃ/ is behavinglike a single consonant in English(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng), whereas /kw/ is asequence of two separate consonants.

When such decisions have been made, a list of the consonants usedin the language can be compiled and the total of distinct ones addedup. For English (http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng), thereis general agreement that the consonant inventory contains 24consonants, though some linguists might decide there are one or twomore or less than this. In the survey of 566 languages reported herea strong effort has been made to apply consistent criteria indetermining the consonant inventory size. This sometimes leads tosome difference from the conclusions in published descriptions of the

Abkhaz having only a smallconsonant inventory soundswrong to me, to myknowledge that should belarge.

References

Louw 1975(http://wals.info/refdb/record/Louw­1975)

Lindblom and Maddieson1988(http://wals.info/refdb/record/Lindblom­and­Maddieson­1988)

languages concerned. For most languages relatively straightforwarddecisions can be reached, but others are more problematic. A difficultchoice often concerns whether to include consonants found only inwords borrowed from other languages; generally those soundsintroduced just in the last few generations as the result of the spreadof world languages such as English(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_eng), Spanish(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_spa), Russian(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_rus), Mandarin(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_mnd), and Modern StandardArabic (http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_ams) have beenexcluded.

The range of resulting inventories extends from a low of 6consonants to a high of 122. Rotokas(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_rtk) (West Bougainville(http://wals.info/languoid/family/westbougainville); Papua New Guinea(http://wals.info/country/PG)) has only six consonants. These mightbe represented in a simplified transcription with the letters /p, t, k, b,d, g/ although the range of pronunciations heard in different wordpositions covers a considerably wider range of sounds than theseletters suggest. !Xóõ (http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_xoo)(Southern Khoisan (http://wals.info/family/khoisan#southernkhoisan);Botswana (http://wals.info/country/BW)) has 122 consonants, mainlybecause it has a very large number of different click sounds withwhich a word may begin. The more typical consonant inventory sizeis in the low twenties, with the mean for the 562 languages being22.7, the modal value 22 and the median 21. Consonant inventoriesclose to this size (22 ± 3) have been categorized as average, and theremainder divided into the categories small (from 6 to 14consonants), moderately small (15­18), moderately large (26­33),and large (34 or more consonants). As Figure 1 illustrates, theparticular cut­off values for the categories were chosen so as toapproximate a histogram with a normal distribution, although thereare somewhat more languages with inventories smaller than the banddefined as “average” than with larger than average inventories.

Figure 1: Histogram of languages in the sampleaccording to categories of consonant inventory size

2. Geographical distribution

Languages with average size consonant inventories are found inmost areas of the world, suggesting that this size truly is arepresentative of something typical for spoken human languages.The languages with larger or smaller inventories on the other handdisplay quite marked regional disparities in their distribution.

Those with smaller than average consonant inventories predominatein the Pacific region (including New Guinea), in South America and inthe eastern part of North America, with particular concentrations of“small” inventories in New Guinea and the Amazon basin. The degreeof typological similarity with respect to consonant inventory sizebetween the languages of New Guinea and Australia is intriguing.The received idea is that the population ancestral to speakers oftoday’s Australian (http://wals.info/languoid/family/australian)languages reached the continent when New Guinea and Australiawere connected by dry land in the now partly­submerged landmassknown to geologists as the Sahul shelf. Since the landbridge linkingNew Guinea and Australia was severed around 7000 years ago,contact between Australian and New Guinea peoples is believed tohave been strictly limited except in the immediate region of the TorresStraits. Could this similarity represent the conservation of a traitcommon to languages spoken long ago when the lands were joined?

Those with larger than average consonant inventories are particularlystrongly represented in Africa, especially south of the equator, as wellas in an area in the heart of the Eurasian landmass, but are mostspectacularly concentrated in the northwest of North America. Thelanguages in this latter area belong to a number of different languagefamilies with no demonstrable genealogical relationship, includingEskimo­Aleut (http://wals.info/languoid/family/eskimoaleut), Na­Dene(http://wals.info/languoid/family/nadene), Salishan(http://wals.info/languoid/family/salishan), Tsimshianic(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_tsi) and Wakashan(http://wals.info/languoid/family/wakashan), among others. There isno evidence that the predominance of large consonant inventories inthis area is a consequence of direct borrowing of words betweenthese languages although cultural contacts between the peoplesconcerned are in many cases intense and deep­rooted. The situationis clearly different in one part of the African zone where largeconsonant inventories occur. Several Bantu languages (part of thelarger Niger­Congo (http://wals.info/languoid/family/nigercongo)family) in the southern part of the continent, such as Zulu(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_zul) and Yeyi(http://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_yey), are known to haveenlarged their consonant inventory by borrowing clicks and othersounds which they did not previously use from languages of theKhoisan group, which already had many consonants (see, forexample Louw 1975) (http://wals.info/refdb/record/Louw­1975).

3. Theoretical issuesMapping the size of consonant inventories prepares the way toinvestigate two connected issues. The first concerns how complexityof different aspects of the sound patterns of languages is related. All

human languages are capable of expressing the range of humanneeds; it might therefore be assumed that they would be similar intheir level of complexity. We have seen that by one simple measureof their phonological complexity, the size of the consonant inventory,languages cover quite a wide range. But complexity in one aspectmight be balanced out by simplicity in another, so that in aggregateall languages are similarly complex. If this is so, mapping differentaspects of phonological complexity should tend to show inverserelationships between one aspect and another in level of complexity.If this is not found, it is reasonable to conclude that languages are notconstrained to be similar in this particular way, but that languageswith quite different levels of complexity function just as well as eachother. Several of the maps that follow will contribute to consideringthis question, by mapping properties of the vowel inventory (chapter 2(http://wals.info/chapter/2)), the syllable structure (chapter 12(http://wals.info/chapter/12)) and the presence and complexity of tonesystems (chapter 13 (http://wals.info/chapter/13)).

The second issue concerns the hypothesis that there is an overallrelationship between the size of a consonant inventory and the kindof consonants it includes. According to the “size principle” (Lindblomand Maddieson 1988) (http://wals.info/refdb/record/Lindblom­and­Maddieson­1988) smaller consonant inventories will tend to containonly those consonants which are in various ways inherently simpler(perhaps because they involve smaller movements to pronouncethem, or are easier for a listener to distinguish from other sounds).Consonants which are inherently more complex will be found in largerinventories. If this hypothesis is correct then the geographicaldistribution of inherently complex consonants should mirror thedistribution of larger consonant inventories. In three of the followingchapters, 6 (http://wals.info/chapter/6), 7 (http://wals.info/chapter/7)and 19 (http://wals.info/chapter/19), the occurrence of some selectedclasses of complex consonants will be mapped as a test of thishypothesis as well as for the inherent interest of seeing thedistribution concerned.

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