Syllabic consonant

Syllabic consonant
◌̩
◌̍
IPA number	431
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	̩
Unicode (hex)	U+0329

A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the m, n and l in the English words rhythm, button and bottle, or is the nucleus of a syllable, like the r sound in the American pronunciation of work. To represent it, the understroke diacritic in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is used, ⟨U+0329  ̩ COMBINING VERTICAL LINE BELOW⟩. It may be instead represented by an overstroke, ⟨U+030D  ̍ COMBINING VERTICAL LINE ABOVE⟩ if the symbol that it modifies has a descender, such as in [ŋ̍].

In many varieties of High and Low German, pronouncing syllabic consonants may be considered a sign of nativity. In High German and Tweants (a Low Saxon dialect spoken in the Netherlands), all word-final syllables in infinite verbs and feminine plural nouns spelled -en are pronounced with syllabic consonants. The High German infinitive laufen (to walk) is pronounced [ˈlaufn̩] and its Tweants counterpart loopn is pronounced [ˈlɔːʔm̩]. Tweants scholars even debate whether or not this feature should be incorporated in spelling, resulting in two generally accepted spelling forms (either loopn or lopen).

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