Introduction

While it is true that there are fricatives in nearly all of the world's languages, there have been relatively few studies of their precise distribution or of the patterns of occurrence which they show. Nonetheless, many linguists have expressed beliefs about universal tendencies affecting fricatives: for example, Fromkin and Rodman (1978: 331) say “If a language has fricatives (most do), it will have an /s/”, and Bright (1978: 39) says:

Statements such as these have been made on the basis of personal experience rather than on the kind of quantifiable research which is the only secure foundation for conclusions which depend on frequency of occurrence.

In this chapter, we will examine the fricatives in the inventories of the languages in UPSID, describe their frequency and patterns of co-occurrence, and suggest some generalizations which apply. Where possible, reasons why these generalizations hold will be suggested.

We adopt a conventional definition of fricatives, namely they are those speech sounds produced by the narrow approximation of two articulators so as to produce a turbulent airstream (Ladefoged 1971: 46). Note that this definition does not include the majority of sounds represented by the symbol /h/. Sounds transcribed with /h/ have often been labeled “glottal fricatives”, but as Pike (1943) and others have pointed out, /h/ is normally a voiceless counterpart of an abutting voiced segment (most often a vowel).