#fricative

Gretchen: So, when I make a /f/ or /z/ or /h/, I’m making some degree of constriction. I’m pushing some parts together a little bit, and then I’m forcing the air through, and that turbulence or that gush of air is making this very friction-y sound.

Lauren: That flow of air is very different to a sound where a part of your mouth is fully closed, like /p/ or /t/. These sounds like “vote” or “shin” can really go on as long as you have air in your lungs.

Gretchen: At the same time, your mouth isn’t fully open like /a/ /i/ where you’re doing a full vowel. You’re definitely creating a point of constriction in your mouth, it’s just that it’s not a completely closed off bit of air.

Lauren: That constriction creates friction, and that’s why these types of sounds are known as “fricatives.” One of the best ways that I have of remembering fricatives is the phrase, “Fricative parties don’t stop,” because you get that continuing rush of air.

Gretchen: Ah, yes. You can do the continuing rush of air. And also, because this is even funnier if you know that these sounds like P and D where the air does stop in your mouth are technically known as “stops.” So, the fricative party is not a stop – I think this was one of the first linguistics memes I encountered was about the fricative party doesn’t stop.

Lauren: I’ve definitely seen it on posters and t-shirts. It’s a good one. It’s good if you use it to remember this type of sound. We’re gonna take a tour of some of our favourite fricatives in this episode.

Gretchen: With the caveat that the fricatives row of the International Phonetic Alphabet is the most populated row of sounds. There are a lot of fricatives. We’re not gonna get to all of them. This is an express train tour that doesn’t stop at all of the stops. Oh, wow, no, I can’t say the word “stop” anymore.

Lauren: This metaphor has failed very early on. We will be visiting some of our favourite fricatives. If you have other fricative stories or facts that you want to share, please feel free to talk about them in the patron Discord or you can tag Lingthusiasm on social media, and we might be able to share them.

Gretchen: There are more fricative stories that we have not told. Please continue the fricative party. May it never stop.

Lauren: The best place is start is probably with the /f/ in “fricative,” which is a fricative itself.

Gretchen: This is my favourite type of linguistic terminology. Not all linguistics terminology is as convenient as this, but “fricative” begins with a fricative. It’s very convenient and easy to remember that way.

Lauren: I feel like we’ve done some other self-defining terminology episodes. We’ve done one on rhotics, which starts with a /ɹ/.

Gretchen: That’s true. Unfortunately, we’ve done an episode on schwa, which does not have a schwa in it but used to. There used to be /ʃəwa/. It doesn’t always happen, but occasionally it’s very nice.

Lauren: It’s very satisfying when it does. The other fricative in “fricative” is –

Gretchen: Ah, there’s a second one!

Lauren: Yeah, /f/ and /v/ are made at exactly the same place in the mouth, usually with your lower lip touching your upper teeth. The difference between them is that the /f/ sound doesn’t involve any vibration, whereas if you make the /v/ sound nothing else has changed, but you’ll feel that buzzing of vibration in your vocal cords while you make it.

Gretchen: I think this is the point where we start saying, all right, it’s a rite of passage for every budding linguist to be going around saying sounds with your hand on your throat thinking about, “What are my lips and tongue doing right now” because you’re so used to doing this automatically, you don’t think about it overtly anymore. If you find yourself doing that at this episode, rest assured you are entirely normal. If people are giving you strange looks, that is their problem.

Lauren: Special shout out to people who are commuting on public transport while listening to this episode.

Gretchen: I’m so sorry. You know, make sure if you’re trying to do this under your breath, you’re not gonna get this vocal cord distinction if you’re whispering because that’s what whispering is. It’s just not using your vocal cords. You will need to say it a little bit louder if you wanna be able to feel that difference. Brought to you by me as a teenager not knowing this and having a real difficult time.

Lauren: Learning the hard way.

Gretchen: Yep. [Laughs]

Lauren: So, English has a /f/ in a word like “fine,” and /v/ in a word like “vine,” but English hasn’t always had a V of its own.

Gretchen: You get these pairs in English of words like “knife/knives,” “wolf/wolves,” “leaf/leaves,” where you make it plural and then the F changes to V. This was this spelling thing that I had to learn as a kid in school, but there’re historical reasons for that.

Lauren: When a sound that doesn’t have vibrations sits between two vowels, which are made with those vibrations, the efficient thing to do is just keep the vibrations happening throughout that little string of sounds – instead of “leafs.”

Gretchen: The complicated thing here, right, is that when you write “wolf/wolves” or “leaf/leaves,” you change the F to a V and add E-S, which is the thing I learned in school. But you do that because at one point, first of all, the E was pronounced. It was like /lifəz/ or something like that. Then that E that was pronounced changed the F to a V. Then we stopped pronouncing the E – the silent E – but we kept the relic of it in the different pronunciation of the F as V.

Lauren: This is not unique to English. This kind of sound change happens across languages quite often. That happened in the middle of words, but then the other thing that happened to English was French turned up, and French does have that V sound at the start of words as well. So, if an English word has a /v/ at the beginning, there’s a very high chance that that was borrowed from French.

Gretchen: Now, English has words like “vine” and “very” and things like that that got borrowed from languages like French and Latin that did have a V sound. So now, V feels like it has this full status in English as a sound you can use in a lot of different contexts, but it wasn’t always like that. We have a few relics of that left in the writing system. Also, with pairs like “give” and “gift,” where F and V sometimes make a pair. /f/ and /v/ are made with the lip and one part of the teeth, but you can actually make a fricative with both of the lips like /ɸ/ and /β/ if you sort of try to make /p/ but just give them a little more space, you can make /ɸ/ and /β/. This isn’t found in English really, but it is found in other languages. They’re found in Spanish to some degree. These sounds sound quite a lot like either /b/ or /v/ or either /p/ or /f/. Sometimes, the languages just use them as variants of sounds they already have, and they don’t make them stars of like, “We’re gonna make this sound carry a lot of meaning in this language.” They’re found, but they’re often found as sort of, I dunno, I wanna say like werewolves. They only show up in certain contexts when there’s a full moon.

Lauren: A little bit like our Old English V, which only popped up in the middle of words towards the end of the – and it wasn’t everywhere all the time.

Gretchen: Exactly. Sometimes, you have sounds that can show up in a language but not be particularly important for making entirely new words.

Lauren: If we move our attention further back in the mouth rather than further forward, we end up at the sounds – because there are more than one in English – /θ/ and /ð/.

Gretchen: These are the sounds like in “bath” and “bathe,” or in “either” and “ether.”

Lauren: Oh, that’s a good pair.

Gretchen: Yeah. Or in “wreath” and “wreathe.”

Lauren: We don’t often pay attention to them because they get written in English with the same T-H combination, but they’re actually two different sounds – one involves vibration of the vocal cords, and one doesn’t.

Gretchen: This vocal cord vibration theme just keeps coming up because especially in English with the history of fricatives /bæθ/ and /bɛɪð/, /ɹiθ/ and /ɹið/, /bɹɛθ/ and /bɹið/ – they were also sort of pairs where one of them had a vowel after them. That version of the T-H – which there are two T-H sounds – was between two vowels just like the F was between two vowels and became V and the /θ/ in between two vowels became /ð/, which is also getting that here’s your vocal cords vibrating again because you’re between two vowels. This is a thing that happens specifically in English fricatives, although it’s not uncommon across other languages as well.

Lauren: I sometimes wonder if we would pay more attention to the difference between /θ/ and /ð/ if we had different symbols for them. English used to before the printing press ruined everything.

Gretchen: I mean, Icelandic still has a symbol for the /ð/ sound, which is this circle with a line in a cross above it, which is called “eth.” This is available in other languages. It’s just not a thing that printing presses from continental Europe had. Because French doesn’t have this sound. Dutch doesn’t have this sound. That’s where they were importing printing presses from. They didn’t have a symbol for this sound, so they were like, “Oh, I guess we could just do something else with it instead.”

Lauren: Whereas the English Runic system used to have “thorn,” which looked like a little thorn on a branch and, I mean, meant “thorn” as well but was used for this sound. It was an attempt to use Y to represent that really lazily in old printing which is why “the olde tea shop” looks like “ye olde tea shop.”

Gretchen: It was actually them just trying to pronounce “the olde tea shop” and use a different letter for it. So, if you ever see that on a ren faire sign, you know what it is from now. The one that they ended up sticking with was using a T-H for both of them. There really would’ve been an argument to use T-H and D-H for them, it’s just that the /ð/ sound is not super common in English even still because we didn’t have a source like French bringing us a whole bunch of /ð/ words the way French brought us a bunch of V words. It’s found in some words, but a lot of them you can tell which one it’s gonna be based on context.

Lauren: These two sounds are not particularly common across the world’s languages. But the most prevalent fricative – in fact, one of the most prevalent sounds that you’ll find across different languages of the world is – once again, moving a little bit further back in our mouths – the sound /s/.

Gretchen: Yes. The glorious S.

Lauren: Satisfyingly common.

Gretchen: “Satisfyingly sneaky” I was hoping you were going to say.

Lauren: There is a high saturation of S. It’s found in around 70% of the world’s languages.

Gretchen: I have a fun story about the letter S versus the sound S.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, that’s always good to separate out the writing system and the sounds that are actually used.

Gretchen: It’s really messed up. The way that I know this is because when I was an undergraduate linguistics student with time on my hands and other linguistic student friends with times on their hands, we made a Scrabble set with International Phonetic Alphabet tiles.

Lauren: Ooo! So, you make words, but instead of spelling them out, you pronounce them out using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Gretchen: Exactly. It’s kind of complicated because you can’t just take all the English alphabet letters and write their International Phonetic Alphabet version because the distribution of tiles in a Scrabble set is like you have a lot of Es, and you only have one Z, and you only have one Q, and stuff like this. You need to figure out what’s really common and what’s really rare and decide both how many of them to put in the game and also what point value to give them. This changes a lot of things. By the way, I do actually have – one of the very first blog posts that I made on my blog was from a couple years earlier this list of IPA Scrabble frequencies. There’s a tiny spreadsheet you can download that has the frequencies and how you can make your own game if you wanna get cardboard and draw on it and then put it on your existing Scrabble set. You can totally do this. Some people have and sent me photos, which is amazing. I have a link to how to do this for yourself if this is a thing you need in your life now. But playing IPA Scrabble is also a super interesting experience because almost the thing that was weird about it was not just what letters are surprisingly hard and they’re rare – that’s how I learned that it’s really hard to play “the” in IPA Scrabble because it’s a really high-value letter that isn’t found in a ton of words – but also, letters that you would expect would be easy are sometimes actually surprisingly hard. One of those is S.

Lauren: Okay. Because our letter S doesn’t always represent us saying the sound /s/.

Gretchen: Exactly. The letter S in the English orthography, sometimes it’s combined with an H, but that makes a /ʃ/ sound. That’s a different tile in IPA Scrabble. You have a /ʃ/ tile and you have a /s/ tile. This is in words like “sea” – okay, there’s your S making an S sound – but then in “she,” you’d spell this in IPA Scrabble as a /ʃ/ plus an /i/.

Lauren: Because in English we use S-H to represent that /ʃ/ sound.

Gretchen: Right. There’s a source of Ss that you can no longer play.

Lauren: Oh, there’s so many /ʃ/ words.

Gretchen: Right! Sometimes, an S makes a /ʃ/ sound, and you don’t even have an H there. A word like “sure,” again, “sir” – well, that’s a word in English, actually, but it’s a different word.

Lauren: You would have to have a very specific English accent to say, “I am /sijʌ:/.”

Gretchen: Right. I mean, maybe there’s an English accent that does this. The way we played IPA Scrabble for the rules because obviously it’s hard to have an authority that’s in charge of how anyone says is you had to pronounce the way you were spelling it as you put it on the board. If you pronounced it differently from what you were putting on the board, it was like, “I don’t think this word spells what you think it spells.” And that word had to be a valid pronunciation of the word in any dialect of English that anybody was aware of. Additionally, you have this other problem. It’s not just the /ʃ/ problem with trying to play S in IPA Scrabble, which is a problem that I’m sure everyone finds completely relatable and common in your lives, but also you have a /z/ problem because there are actually a lot of words in English which are written with an S but where it’s pronounced like a Z.

Lauren: Oh my gosh, that’s half of English plurals because we use the S in writing to represent a plural. It’s “one cat,” “two cats,” so that’s fine, but it’s “one dog,” “two /dagz/.”

Gretchen: Exactly. This has the really interesting side effect that the Z tile in IPA Scrabble is suddenly really easy and low value to play because you can just use it to pluralize things.

Lauren: Z is finally having its moment. It makes me really happy that this fricative is getting the attention that it deserves when you move away from writing.

Gretchen: Again, words like “dogs” but also like “wise” or something like “analyse,” which has two different spellings depending on whether you wanna spell it with a Z or an S, but the S spelling is no longer legitimate if you’re playing in IPA Scrabble because it’s actually pronounced with a Z both times.

Lauren: Just a call back to moments ago, once again, a lot of those have arisen because /s/ was between two vowels and that turns on the voicing in your vocal cords.

Gretchen: You have words in English like /hæʊs/ and /hæʊz/ which, again, it’s a pair like “breath” and “breathe” where, even though they’re both written the same way in modern-day English, one of them is the noun and one of them is the verb, and you can hear that in how the fricatives change. You can also hear that because I have Canadian raising in the vowels. That’s beside the point.

Lauren: That’s a whole other topic.

Gretchen: That’s another episode someday. So, S in English spelling can be /ʃ/. It can be /z/. It can also be the sound that’s like the combination of those two things which is the furthest from S which is /ʒ/. This is a word like “measure” or “Asia,” “leisure.” Here you have an S in the writing system that for various historical reasons has acquired both the /z/ attribute of being between two vowels where your vocal cords are now doing a thing and also the /ʃ/ attribute of another context in the word being before a /j/ sound, often, where it’s become more like the /j/. It’s gotten both of those things, and you have /mɛʒɹ̩/ and /liʒɹ̩/ and /ɛɪʒə/. Let me tell you, this is the highest value and most difficult card to play in IPA Scrabble is the /ʒ/ sound because it mostly shows up in English in either words that we’ve borrowed from other languages like “genre” or “rouge” or “zhuzh” or words that have multiple syllables where it’s arrived there for historical phonological reasons like “measure” and “leisure,” which at one point was /mɛʃɹ̩/ or /mɛsiɹ̩/ and gradually got smooshed together more and into a /ʒ/ sound.

Lauren: I love how deeply uncomfortable that sounded for you to say.

Gretchen: It’s so difficult! It sounds like I’m saying “messier,” which probably if you say it fast is just like “measure.”

Lauren: It’s just such an embedded part of the way English works to make these changes in the middle of words.

Gretchen: /ʒ/ the IPA character tile becomes really difficult to play because it’s found in this fairly limited context, but it is in English, and so you have to put it in your IPA Scrabble set. And /s/ which is often used to spell this whole set of words suddenly actually gets a little bit more difficult to play, even though it’s still found in lots of words like “sea” and “sit” and tons of nice, short, Scrabble-icious words. But it’s a bit harder than it used to be.

Lauren: As a literate English speaker, I image there’s a lot of just trying to undo what your brain perceives as writing and listening to the actual sounds that are happening.

Gretchen: It gives you a ton of compassion for children learning how to read and write where they have to be told, “No, I know we told you that S makes the /s/ sound, except in all of these words where it can make four other sounds.”

Lauren: Shall we visit a fricative that’s not in English? There are many, and there are many ways that fricatives get used but English do not use them. It’s always lovely to hear about other people’s language speaking and language learning experiences with these. But let’s visit Wales, and we’ll visit Welsh.

Gretchen: Okay, let’s go to Wales. Staying on the British Isles but with a Celtic language.

Lauren: Welsh has a sound /l/ like in English, but they also have a sound that’s made at exactly the same place in the mouth, but instead of going /l/, you just – well, first of all, you turn off the vibrations in your vocal folds, and then you make it like a fricative. It’s written with a double L. A name like Llewellyn in Welsh would be /ɬuɛlɛn/.

Gretchen: The fun thing is – so I know a Welsh person who produces very nice /ɬ/s, and at one point I made some sort of joke about – do you know the clothing chain known as L.L. Bean? They make sweaters and stuff.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, I feel like it’s a thing I have not encountered but have heard of.

Gretchen: I don’t know if I’ve been to any in Canada, but they’re a thing I’m vaguely aware of. I was like, “Oh, so does this mean that you pronounce ‘L.L. Bean’ as if it’s Welsh?” And they actually had to pause and be like, “Wait. I’ve always in my head just been pronouncing this store as /ɬəbin/.

Lauren: Oh, no! Really? Amazing.

Gretchen: And every time now – if you’re ever having a bad day, you can just go /ɬəbin/.

Lauren: /ɬəbin/. That is charming.

Gretchen: Isn’t there a musician LL Cool J which I don’t think my friends have heard of?

Lauren: No, I think you mean /ɬ/ Cool Jay.

Gretchen: Exactly. I made this joke with my friend’s permission on Twitter, and somebody responded, “Well, that’s what happens when you talk to ‘inte/ɬ/ectuals.’”

Lauren: I will never look at a double L in English the same way ever again. Thank you so much, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Thank my Welsh friend who prefers to remain anonymous but whose permission I did get to share this story. It’s a fun sound. It’s not only found in Welsh, but it is definitely one of the distinctive sounds in Welsh. It’s just a really delightful fricative.

Lauren: Been a nice holiday.

Gretchen: Shall we head over to the European continent?

Lauren: Sounds great. Another lovely fricative which is – we’re been moving further and further back in the mouth as make these – and so now we’re at /x/.

Gretchen: /x/ is fairly interesting because there’s a couple sounds there. There’s the sound that’s produced with your tongue in the same position as you would use to make a K – /x/. And then there’s a sound that’s a tiny bit further back that has the vibration of the uvula, which is the part in your throat that dangles down and vibrates when you scream in a cartoon.

Lauren: That’s officially how it’s described, yes.

Gretchen: You know, the screaming cartoon child mouth one. That’s the technical definition. /x/, /χ/, which is a little bit further back in the throat – and some languages will just treat both of those sounds as variations on the same thing. Some languages will have one or the other. There’s probably some language that has both and differentiates between them as well, but there’s both things going on there. A lot of the languages on the European continent have this /x/χ/ sound, especially the one that’s a little bit further forward in the mouth. Actually, we didn’t need to leave the British Isles because Scots and Scottish English has the /x/ sound as in /lax/, but also you see it in German – the classic German /bax/ example that gets cited in language textbooks. One that doesn’t get cited but is also still the same sound is the sound that J spells in Spanish as in “jalapeño.”

Lauren: /xæləpɛɲʝo/. Ah, that’s a fricative.

Gretchen: That’s a fricative, and it’s the same fricative that’s in the same position as a K, which gets written as X in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Sometimes, people think of that sound as a variant on H, whereas they think of the German or the Scottish sound as a variant on K, but they’re actually both the same sound if you look at how people actually produce them.

Lauren: That’s so interesting. It ties into another area of phonetics. We’ve been talking a lot about the way we produce sounds, but there’s also really interesting things that happened when we look at how people perceive specific sounds in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and how that differs depending on the language that’s being spoken or the people who are doing the speaking.

Gretchen: The sound that’s represented with an X, the /x/ sound, it shows up in a lot of ideas that people have about languages. I think it’s really leftover World War II propaganda, honestly, because German gets stereotyped as like, “Oh, it’s got this sound. It’s very hard in the back of the throat,” but also this sound is in Dutch and Spanish, and people aren’t saying this like, “Oh, it’s so harsh,” about Dutch because they were our allies in the Second World War. Dutch actually has more of them because Dutch has this K-like sound that’s where your vocal cords aren’t vibrating, but it also has a /g/-like sound, where your vocal cords are vibrating, /ɣ/. /ɣ/ – I don’t know if I can do it well. But if anything, Dutch has more of these, and yet no one is saying this about the Dutch.

Lauren: That’s what I always find really interesting about the values that we attach to these sounds that are produced similarly. It’s just the context that they’re produced in really varies our attitudes toward them.

Gretchen: Arabic has some of these sounds that are in the back of the throat. The /x/ sound as well as a few others. But also, so does French. People aren’t saying that French sounds harsh and guttural in the same sorts of ways. I hate the word “guttural” as applied to a language. It doesn’t have a linguistically defined meaning. It generally just means “I’m going to be kind of racist now.”

Lauren: I should say that I specifically find the way people ascribe values interesting. I find the types of values that get ascribed very tedious. Learning about how sounds work mechanistically in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a really good way to start trying to step back from those knee-jerk reactions you have.

Gretchen: Exactly. The other fun fact about the fricative that’s in this sort of C/K/G position is that it’s sort of a ghost sound in English.

Lauren: Okay. Because of the “loch” situation in Scottish English?

Gretchen: Not only that, but this is actually the sound that in English used to be represented with the sequence G-H. This is in words like “knight” or “laugh” or “enough” or also a certain person’s surname who you may have met.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, your surname, Gretchen McCullough.

Gretchen: Thank you. Sometimes it gets represented as G-H. There are other people who have the O-U-G-H spelling of my surname. Mine is spelled O-C-H. Because in modern English it often gets approximated with C-H or maybe K-H. But historically in English it was written with G-H. This is why you get G-H making all of these different sounds in English because in words like “laugh” and “cough” it got made into a different fricative. So, /lax/ and /kax/ became “laugh” and “cough.”

Lauren: And your name became /məkələf/.

Gretchen: [Laughs] If only. I could have been /məkələf/.

Lauren: So, that didn’t happen. It went through other paths as well.

Gretchen: And sometimes it just went to zero. You have like “through” and “though” and “knight” and “light,” and that just became silent and maybe affected the sound of the vowel next to it. Then in some cases it became like a K like in the way I say my name /məkələk/ or in modern-day Anglicisations of /lak/ or /bak/ which is how you get a lot of English speakers saying those words if they’re not super comfortable with that particular fricative. They’ll pick the stop that’s in the same position – the K. It’s this very interesting sort of woo here’s this ghost that was there in English, and it still left its ghostly footprints in various parts of the language.

Lauren: Left us little traces.

Gretchen: Except, incidentally, for the word “ghost,” which was never actually pronounced like that. The H got added I think because of some early printers.

Lauren: We are big fans of printing as a technology. We haven’t got a lot of happy things to say about it in this episode, but I don’t wanna drive that point home too hard. While we are talking about ghosts, shall we finish our tour on H – /h/?

Gretchen: /h/.

Lauren: /h/.

Gretchen: Yeah, there are other fricatives, especially in between /x/ and /h/.

Lauren: Various places we’ve visited.

Gretchen: But /h/ is /ɛɪt͡ʃ/ or /hɛɪt͡ʃ/ depending on while English you speak. I honestly think /hɛɪt͡ʃ/ is more logical – I just didn’t grow up with it – because it actually has the name of the sound in it. This one is interesting in English because it’s also super hard to play in IPA Scrabble.

Lauren: Because words that we think have H in them often don’t pronounce the H.

Gretchen: Right. First of all, sometimes H is silent, and also, H is sometimes used like a modifier character for other sounds.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: You use it sometimes to modify vowels, like /a/ and /u/ and O. You might write those with an H to express that, yeah, I’m just trying to write this vowel – here’s this H that I’ve tacked on. You also use it as a modifier character for consonants. You can have T-H and S-H, like we’ve already talked about; you can have C-H. And all of this stuff you can no longer do if you’re playing IPA Scrabble. You can’t use it as a modifier. What that means is that you also can’t play it at the end of a word.

Lauren: Yes, it only turns up at the start of words, really, if it turns up at all in English.

Gretchen: And occasionally in the middle. You’ll get words like “ahead.”

Lauren: True. I got “ahead” of myself there.

Gretchen: But, yeah, you don’t see it at the end of a syllable, which means you don’t see it at the end of a word. It means if you’re trying to make this branching Scrabble-style combination of words, once you see an H, you’ve created a dead end for yourself if you can’t then attach the end of a word onto it. This isn’t true in other languages.

Lauren: Oh, yeah. That’s true. That is pretty much exactly the reason that we have names like “Sarah” and “Hannah” that are often spelt with a H. They don’t have to be because those sounds aren’t pronounced in English – those Hs at the end of words. But I think it’s because names like that are often borrowed from Hebrew where those final Hs are pronounced. We retained the spelling convention without retaining the pronunciation.

Gretchen: When I was studying Arabic, there are totally still words in Arabic that have a final H that can be pronounced. You could say /hænʌh/ or /sɑɹʌh/, which might be a way to say it in another language but is not how they’re conventionally said in English because even producing that H at the end of a word can be a challenge for English speakers – or hearing it can be a challenge for English speakers.

Lauren: It’s possibly not that surprising that we don’t have H at the end of words. In fact, even at the start of words, we don’t pronounce it a lot even if it might’ve been there historically in words like “hour.” That’s why we say “an hour” because we treat it as though it starts with a vowel, and why North Americans often says /ɹ̩bz/ instead of /hɹ̩bz/. It’s an easy sound to misplace because there’s not a whole lot going on. As a fricative, it’s not the most fricative of fricatives. There’s not a lot of frication happening there.

Gretchen: And H is interesting because it’s actually produced with the vocal cords themselves constricting to make a fricative. The only thing that you’re doing is /h/ with your vocal cords. There aren’t a lot of nerve endings in the vocal cords, so I’m always like, “I’m doing this, and I can make it because I’m thinking of the sound, but I don’t feel like I’m actually feeling it” because your vocal cords don’t have a lot of nerve endings. I think it would actually drive you up the wall to be feeling this constant, like, clash in your throat every single time you were engaging them in the middle of a word. It’s probably good that they don’t have a lot of nerve endings. But I feel like, unlike your lips where you can put them in a spot and feel them there, the further you go back in the throat, the further you start feeling what you’re doing with being there.

Lauren: When we were researching this episode, we actually looked at the International Phonetic Alphabet from a bunch of versions of it because the International Phonetic Association regularly meet and assess the state of research and update the International Phonetic Alphabet. H has been on this little journey where, in 2005, /h/ shared a row with the fricatives, who we’ve met a bunch of, but also with sounds like /j/ and /w/ that are less about fricatives.

Gretchen: /j/ and /w/ have a bit of a bigger syllable. They have a little bit of constriction in the mouth, but they have a bit of a bigger opening and a little bit less friction. I can kind of see how somebody could say, “Well, maybe, what if we treated H as sometimes it seems to show up like the /j/ or /w/ and has a bit of less friction,” but then they restored it only being a fricative box, possibly because it’s confusing to have one symbol occupy two boxes because they don’t really do that very much elsewhere in the IPA.

Lauren: It’s been on this little journey. It is currently a fully-fledged fricative, but it has been on an interesting little journey I think because there’s less movement happening throughout the vocal tract while you’re saying it.

Gretchen: It’s also a bit harder to see it and feel what’s going on. Fricatives have a special spot for me because they were one of the first things that I learned about when I was in high school, and I was teaching myself linguistics, and I was trying to get access to books and stuff. I remember sitting down and being like, “Okay, here’s this description of like” – there’re actually words that describe all the different things that your mouth is doing when you’re making all these different sounds, and you can describe what place is undergoing the constriction, and you can describe how much constriction you’re doing, and you have this thing in the vocal cords and all of these combinations. I remember when I was probably about 15, and I was trying to wrap my head around this whole process, I was on a car trip with my mom, and I was explaining to her like, “Here’s what’s going on in your mouth. And here’s what this is. And here’s what this is.” And she was listening very appreciatively as parents sometimes do.

Lauren: You have a bit of a captive audience on a car trip.

Gretchen: You have a captive audience on a car trip, and I was like, “Here’s the thing.” Ever since then, I think she retained that bit, and she especially retained the word “fricative” because she just really liked the sound of the word “fricative.”

Lauren: It’s a fun word to say.

Gretchen: She was like, “It sounds like a swear word. You can just be like, ‘Fricative! I don’t wanna do this!’” [Laughs] Every so often she would – when I kept doing linguistics at university – she’d be like, “How are the fricatives doing? What’s going on with the fricatives now?”

Lauren: Bless.

Gretchen: I feel like our new fricative-themed merch is somewhat inspired by my mom’s absolute delight in the word “fricative.”

Lauren: We thought we’d take some inspiration from Gretchen’s mom who found it mildly expletive in its energy. Whether you say it in surprise or joy or frustration, we have made a range of “What the fricative” merch for you.

Gretchen: Yes, you can put “What the fricative” on a mug or a t-shirt, a notebook, various other items and make people think, “Is this person swearing?” And then you have an excuse to tell them some linguistics.

Lauren: You can share your favourite fricative story with people who appreciate your merch or on social media.

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Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get kiki bouba scarves, “What the fricative” t-shirts, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to 53 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans, and you can even sponsor your favourite fricative or other International Phonetic Alphabet symbol on our Patreon IPA Wall of Fame. Recent bonus topics include the linguistics of Pokémon names, backchannelling, and speaking under the influence of various substances. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is produced by Gretchen “McCullof” and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Managing Producer is Liz McCullough, our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

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