In the world's languages, the occurrence of implosives shows a strong cline from
front to back points of articulation. Bilabial is the most common implosive. It is very rarely lacking in the inventory of languages which have implosive stops. On the other hand, implosives with a back articulation (such as velar ) occur much less frequently; apart from a few exceptions, the presence of the velar implosive goes along with the presence of implosives further forward. One of the few languages with a farther back implosive (specifically the alveolar one ), and without the bilabial implosive, is
Yali, a
Dani language spoken on the Indonesian side of
New Guinea. Implosives are widespread among the languages of
Sub-Saharan Africa and
Southeast Asia and are found in a few languages of the
Amazon Basin. They are rarely reported elsewhere but occur in scattered languages such as the
Mayan languages in
North America, and
Saraiki and
Sindhi in the
Indian subcontinent. They appear to be entirely absent as phonemes from
Europe and northern
Asia and from
Australia, even from the Australian ceremonial language
Damin, which uses every other possible airstream mechanism besides
percussives. However, Alpher (1977) reports that the
Nhangu language of Australia may actually contain implosives, though more research is needed to determine the true nature of these sounds. Implosives may occasionally occur phonetically in some European languages: For instance, in some northern dialects of
Ingrian, intervocalic bilabial stops may be realised as the implosive or . Fully voiced stops are slightly implosive in a number of other languages, but this is not often described explicitly if there is no contrast with modal-voiced plosives. This situation occurs from
Maidu to
Thai to many
Bantu languages, including
Swahili.
Sindhi and
Saraiki have an unusually large number of contrastive implosives, with . Although Sindhi has a dental–retroflex distinction in its plosives, with , the contrast is neutralized in the implosives. A contrastive retroflex implosive may also occur in
Ngad'a, a language spoken in
Flores,
Indonesia, and occurs in
Wadiyara Koli, a language spoken in
India and
Pakistan which in total has . More examples can be found in the articles on individual implosives. Voiceless implosives are quite rare, but are found in languages as varied as the Owere dialect of
Igbo in
Nigeria ( ),
Krongo in
Sudan, the Uzere dialect of
Isoko, the closely related
Lendu and
Ngiti languages in the
Democratic Republic of Congo,
Serer in
Senegal (), and some dialects of the
Poqomchi’ and
Quiche languages in
Guatemala (). Owere Igbo has a seven-way contrast among bilabial stops, , and its alveolar stops are similar. The
voiceless velar implosive occurs marginally in
Uspantek and occurs in
Mam,
Kaqchikel, and
Uspantek.
Lendu has been claimed to have voiceless , but they may actually be
creaky-voiced implosives. Some English speakers use a voiceless velar implosive to imitate the "glug-glug" sound of liquid being poured from a bottle, but others use a voiced implosive . ==References==