A
syllabic consonant is a
consonant which either forms a
syllable on its own, like the
m,
n and
l in the English words
rhythm,
button and
bottle, or is the
nucleus of a syllable, such as the
r sound in the American pronunciation of
work. The
diacritic for this in the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is the under-stroke, . It may be represented by an over-stroke, , if the symbol that it modifies has a
descender, such as in .
- Most languages that have syllabic consonants have syllabic sonorants such as nasals and liquids. A very few have syllabic obstruents such as stops and fricatives in normal words, though English has syllabic fricatives in paralinguistic words like shh! and zzz.