Implosive consonant
consonantal sound
Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism. That is, the airstream is controlled by moving the glottis downward in addition to expelling air from the lungs. Therefore, unlike the purely glottalic ejective consonants, implosives can be modified by phonation. Contrastive implosives are found in approximately 13% of the world's languages.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, implosives are indicated by modifying the top of a letter (voiced stop) with a rightward-facing hook: bilabial ⟨ɓ⟩, alveolar ⟨ɗ ⟩, retroflex ⟨ᶑ ⟩ (this letter is 'implicit' in the IPA), palatal ⟨ ʄ ⟩, velar ⟨ɠ ⟩ and uvular ⟨ʛ ⟩.
Articulation
During the occlusion of the stop, pulling the glottis downward rarefies the air in the vocal tract. The stop is then released. In languages whose implosives are particularly salient, that may result in air rushing into the mouth before it flows out again with the next vowel. To take in air sharply in that way is to implode a sound.
However, probably more typically, there is no movement of air at all, which contrasts with the burst of the pulmonary plosives.
“Implosive consonant” enters the record as consonantal sound. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Implosive, consonant and consonantal can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Implosive consonant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.