sonority

Sonority is a measure of the relative perceptual prominence or loudness of speech sounds within a language. In phonology, it describes how loud or resonant a sound tends to be to a listener and helps account for patterns in syllable structure and consonant clustering. The concept is not a direct acoustic metric, but a heuristic that correlates with features such as vowel-like properties, voicing, and manner of articulation.

A common sonority hierarchy places vowels at the top, followed by glides (semivowels), liquids, nasals, voiceless and voiced fricatives, and stops at the bottom. Variants exist across languages and theoretical frameworks, and the exact ranking is not universal. The hierarchy is often used with the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), which predicts that syllables typically peak in sonority at the vowel nucleus and show rising sonority in the onset and falling sonority in the coda.

In practice, sonority helps explain why certain consonant clusters are allowed or disallowed and why syllable structure varies cross-linguistically. It informs phonotactic descriptions and language teaching. Critics note that the SSP and standard hierarchies do not capture all cross-linguistic data, and that phonation, rhythm, and language-specific phonotactics can override simple sonority considerations.

Overall, sonority remains a foundational concept in phonology for describing and predicting patterns of sound organization in the syllable.