Pre-voicing (phonetics)

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In phonetics, prevoicing means that voicing begins before the release of a stop consonant. This means that the voice onset time has a negative value. In the Extended IPA for speech pathology, this is transcribed with a voicing diacritic placed in front of the consonant, as in [  ̬z].

Phonemically prevoiced consonants have been reported from some of the Khoisan languages of Southern Africa, such as Ju/’hoan and !Xóõ. However, these have more recently been reanalysed as consonant clusters with mixed voicing, such as [dt] and [dts’kx’].