In phonetics, a continuant is a speech sound produced without a complete closure in the oral cavity.
By one definition, continuant is a distinctive feature that refers to any sound produced with an incomplete closure of the vocal tract, thus encompassing all sounds (including vowels) except stops, affricates and nasals. By another definition, it refers exclusively to consonantal sounds produced with an incomplete closure of the oral cavity, prototypically approximants and fricatives, but sometimes also trills.
Compare sonorants (resonants), a class of speech sounds which includes vowels, approximants and nasals (but not fricatives), and contrasts with obstruents.
This article uses material from the Wikipedia English article Continuant, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license ("CC BY-SA 3.0"); additional terms may apply (view authors). Content is available under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
®Wikipedia is a registered trademark of the Wiki Foundation, Inc. Wiki English (DUHOCTRUNGQUOC.VN) is an independent company and has no affiliation with Wiki Foundation.