articulaires

Articulaires is a French term that designates matters pertaining to articulation in speech production. In linguistic contexts, it corresponds to the English adjective articulatory and is used to describe how speech sounds are formed by movements of the vocal tract. The study covers the articulators—lips, tongue (tip, blade, dorsum), teeth, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum, and glottis—and the configurations that produce sounds. Key dimensions are the place of articulation (bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular, glottal) and the manner of articulation (stops, fricatives, affricates, nasals, liquids, rhotics, etc.), as well as voicing.

In French-language phonetic literature, articulaires commonly appears in discussions of articulation phenomena, coarticulation, and the dynamics of speech gestures. The term is often encountered in conjunction with other descriptors, such as articulatoires, articulatoire settings, and articulations. The English equivalent is articulatory, with the related field known as articulatory phonetics and, in theoretical work, articulatory phonology, which models phonetic units as gestural configurations of the vocal tract.

The concept is foundational for transcription systems like the IPA, which encode articulatory properties. While the term articulaires is primarily used in French texts, readers of English-language sources should substitute articulatory.