Syllabic consonant

A syllabic consonant is a consonant functioning as a syllable nucleus. Consonant articulation and nuclear position describe different properties, so the combination is not contradictory. In phonetic transcription, a mark below the symbol can indicate syllabicity, as in [n̩].^[ref]

Some pronunciations of English “button” use a final syllabic [n̩]; others contain a vowel before the final nasal. The first pattern does not require an unrecorded vowel simply because the word has a second syllable. Listening and inspecting the acoustic interval can help distinguish the realizations, while identifying a syllable boundary is not equivalent to finding a silent gap in the waveform.