IPA reference · consonant
ʃ — voiceless postalveolar fricative
Friction made slightly behind the alveolar ridge, with the tongue blade raised and the lips usually rounded.
Also called: esh, sh sound
How to make the voiceless postalveolar fricative
Pull the tongue back from the /s/ position, flatten the blade, and round the lips slightly. The sound is lower-pitched than /s/.
English reference points: ship, nation. If you speak English natively you already produce this sound — the work is recognising it and placing it where the target language wants it.
Languages that use it
Sounds it gets confused with
Most pronunciation errors are not random — they are a substitution of the nearest sound the speaker already owns. These are the usual substitutions for ʃ, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Polish sz, Russian ш and Mandarin sh are retroflex — further back and harder.
Polish ś and Mandarin x are further forward and softer.
What this means for learners
English /ʃ/ sits between the retroflex and alveolo-palatal series, so an English speaker learning Polish, Russian or Mandarin sounds wrong for both members of the contrast.
Teaching this sound
Describing a sound in words gets a student roughly half the way there. The other half is hearing it produced correctly, immediately after producing it incorrectly, with both versions available to replay. That is the argument for recording during the lesson rather than after it: the student leaves with your model of ʃ attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol ʃ make?
ʃ is the voiceless postalveolar fricative. Friction made slightly behind the alveolar ridge, with the tongue blade raised and the lips usually rounded. In English you can hear it in: ship, nation.
How do you pronounce ʃ?
Pull the tongue back from the /s/ position, flatten the blade, and round the lips slightly. The sound is lower-pitched than /s/.
Which languages have the voiceless postalveolar fricative?
Among the languages covered here: French (chat, “cat”); German (schön, “beautiful”); Hungarian (sár, “mud”).
What is the difference between ʃ and ʂ?
Polish sz, Russian ш and Mandarin sh are retroflex — further back and harder.