konsonantteja

Konsonantteja is a linguistic term commonly used in Finnish-language sources to refer to the consonant sounds of a language. The concept covers the inventory of consonant phonemes, their phonetic realizations (allophones), and their distribution within syllables, as well as their role in speech perception and production.

Consonants are classified by place of articulation (such as bilabial, alveolar, velar) and by manner of articulation (for example plosive, fricative, nasal, trill, approximant). They may be voiced or voiceless, and many languages distinguish aspiration, nasality, or secondary articulations. The exact set and contrasts of konsonantteja vary across languages, shaping a language’s phonological profile and its phonotactic rules.

In writing systems, konsonantteja are represented by letters or digraphs. Orthographic conventions map consonantal sounds to symbols with varying degrees of regularity. Some languages use a one-to-one correspondence between a consonant phoneme and a single letter, while others employ digraphs, diacritics, or contextual spellings to reflect allophony, palatalization, or contrastive features.

Phonotactics governs how konsonantteja combine into syllables and clusters. Languages differ in permissible onset and coda structures, the allowed sequences of consonants, and how these sequences interact with vowels. Consonant variation can also arise diachronically through sound change, contact with other languages, and sociolinguistic factors, leading to regional dialects and phonetic shifts over time.

See also: phonology, phonetics, orthography, language comparison.