Stimmliche

Stimmliche is a linguistic term used to describe speech sounds produced with vocal fold vibration. In phonetic and phonological description, it contrasts with stimmlos (voiceless). The adjective form stimmlich or stimmhafte can be used to refer to sounds that involve vocal cord vibration, while the corresponding term for non-vibrating sounds is stimmlos.

Physiologically, voicing arises from periodic vibration of the vocal folds in the larynx during articulation. This vibration creates a characteristic acoustic signal that can be registered as a regular waveform in a spectrogram. Voicing is a binary feature for many speech sounds, particularly stops, fricatives, nasals, and approximants, though its realization can vary with emphasis, position in a word, and phonological processes such as devoicing.

In many languages, the most prominent stimmliche versus stimmlose contrast occurs in stops and fricatives. Common examples include stimmhafte Konsonanten like b, d, g (voiced stops) and v, z, ɣ (voiced fricatives), versus stimmløse Konsonanten like p, t, k (voiceless stops) and f, s (voiceless fricatives). Vowels are typically voiced. The voicing contrast is a major component of a language’s phonemic inventory and can interact with other processes, such as final devoicing, assimilation, or voicing spreading in connected speech.

In notation for linguistics, voicing is indicated by the presence or absence of vocal fold vibration, and is often represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet by pairs of symbols that differ only in voicing (for example, [b] vs [p]).