In human speech, ingressive sounds are those in which the airstream is inward through the mouth or nose. The three types of ingressive sounds are lingual ingressive, glottalic ingressive, and pulmonic ingressive (inhaled). The opposite of an ingressive sound is an egressive sound.
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Lingual ingressive, or velaric ingressive, describes an airstream mechanism whereby a sound is produced by closing the vocal tract at two places of articulation in the mouth, rarifying the air in the enclosed space by lowering the tongue, and then releasing both closures. The sounds made this way are called clicks.
This term is generally applied to the implosive consonants, which actually use a mixed glottalic ingressive–pulmonic egressive airstream. True pulmonic ingressives, called voiceless implosives or reverse ejectives, are quite rare. (See implosive consonant.)
Pulmonic ingressive sounds are those ingressive sounds in which the airstream is created by the lungs. Pulmonic ingressive sounds are generally paralinguistic, and may be found as phonemes, words, and entire phrases on all continents and in genetically unrelated languages, most frequently in sounds for agreement and backchanneling.
Pulmonic ingressive sounds are extremely rare outside of paralinguistic phenomena. A pulmonic ingressive phoneme was found in the apparently constructed ritual language Damin, the last speaker of which died in the 1990s. The ǃXóõ language of Botswana has a series of nasalized click consonants in which the nasal airstream is pulmonic ingressive. Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:268) state that "This ǃXóõ click is probably unique among the sounds of the world's languages that, even in the middle of a sentence, it may have ingressive pulmonic airflow."
Speech technologist Robert Eklund (http://roberteklund.info) has found reports of ingressive speech in around 50 languages worldwide, dating as far back as Cranz's (1765) "Historie von Grönland, enthaltend… " where it is mentioned in female affirmations among the Eskimo.
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Norwegian "Ja" |
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| Norwegian spoken ja juxtaposed with ingressive | |
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Several languages include an affirmative "yeah", "yah", "yuh" or "yes" made with inhaled breath which sounds something like a gasp. This is an example of a pulmonic ingressive. This feature is found in:
Two sound files of Swedish ja can be downloaded from http://ingressivespeech.info. Spectrograms are also found there.
More information about pulmonic ingressive speech is found at Robert Eklund's ingressive speech website: http://ingressivespeech.info
http://www.mun.ca/marcomm/gazette/2003-2004/mar18/research.html
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