The voiceless retroflex sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʂ⟩ which is a Latin letter s combined with a retroflex hook. Like all the retroflex consonants, the IPA letter is formed by adding a rightward-pointing hook to the bottom of ⟨s⟩ (the letter used for the corresponding alveolar consonant). A distinction can be made between laminal, apical, and sub-apical articulations. Only one language, Toda, appears to have more than one voiceless retroflex sibilant, and it distinguishes subapical palatal from apical postalveolar retroflex sibilants; that is, both the tongue articulation and the place of contact on the roof of the mouth are different. Some scholars also posit the voiceless retroflex approximant distinct from the fricative. The approximant may be represented in the IPA as ⟨ɻ̊⟩.

Features

Features of the voiceless retroflex fricative:

Occurrence

In the following transcriptions, diacritics may be used to distinguish between apical and laminal. The commonality of cross-linguistically is 6% in a phonological analysis of 2155 languages.

Voiceless retroflex non-sibilant fricative

Features

Features of the voiceless retroflex non-sibilant fricative:

Occurrence