In speech,
consonants may have different places of articulation, generally with full or partial stoppage of the airstream. The descriptions below list positions where the obstruction may occur:
- Bilabial, between the lips
- Labiodental, between the lip and teeth
- Dental, between the lower top teeth and tongue tip
- Alveolar, between the gum ridge and tongue, above dental
- Postalveolar, between the palatal ridge and tongue, behind alveolar position
- Palatal, between the tongue and the palate ("hard palate")
- Retroflex, tongue curled back to face the palate (tongue curled so underside touches the roof of the mouth)
- Velar, between the tongue and back palate (velum, "soft palate")
- Uvular, between the tongue and uvula (back of throat)
- Nasal, any of the above-listed positions pronounced with the velum lowered to allow air to pass through the nose
- Pharyngeal, behind the velum (the muscles used to suppress a belch and/or other less pleasant phenomena)
- Glottal or laryngeal, at the glottis (in the throat, where the larynx prevents food from entering the lungs)
Also:
- In laterals, the air is released past the tongue sides and teeth rather than over the tip of the tongue, and is technically a manner of articulation, not a place of articulation. English speakers often treat this as a separate position because English only has one lateral, /l/. Many languages have more than one, e.g. Spanish written "l" vs. "ll"; Hindi with dental, palatal, and retroflex laterals; and numerous Native American languages with not only lateral stops, but also lateral fricatives and affricates.
Some languages have sounds with two places of articulation. Some common coarticulations include:
- Labialization, rounding the lips while producing the obstruction (often written w)
- Palatalization, raising the tongue body to palatal postion while producing the obstruction (often written y or j)
- Velarization, raising the back of the tongue to velar position (no standard method of representation)
- Fricative coarticulation: usually a velar fricative (often written x) or pharyngeal fricative (often written with a superscript mirror-imaged question mark symbol)
- Fricative release is a term that can be used in describing affricates, which are stops with a delayed release producing a fricative sound: [c] = [ts], [C] = [tS], etc.
- Velar coarticulation: /k/ is produced simulaneously with another stop, e.g. /pk/ (common only in some Bantu language groups) and /tk/ (some South American languages); often, these are written with a tie bar over the two fused sounds