The word fricative is used in phonetics, which is the study of the physical and physiological aspects of speech sounds. A fricative describes a manner of articulation.
To produce a consonant sound in English, you need to know: the place of articulation (where in the vocal tract the sound is produced), the manner of articulation (how the sound is produced – what happens to the air stream), and if the sound is voiced or voiceless (if you use the vocal chords or not). A fricative is produced by restricting the airflow—an example being the sound “fuh”. The place of articulation for “fuh” is the “labial” area (“lips” in Latin), so this particular fricative uses the lips to impede the airflow. (Another example of a manner of articulation would be a “plosive”, for example a “puh” sound. This time, you completely stop the air stream with your lips and then let it out like a small explosion: “puh”.) For the fricative, the idea of a kind of friction in the air stream explains why the word originates from the Latin word for “rub”: “fricare” is the Latin verb “to rub”, so we take the stem and add the English suffix “-ative”: fricative.
The modern study of phonetics started as early as the mid 18th century and in 1860, George Perkins Marsh, an American diplomat and philologist, discussed manners of articulation in his book Lectures on the English language. We can see the word “fricative” in English print for the first time here when he writes about the English b “showing no tendency to the more explosive articulation of some of the German dialects, or the more fricative of the Spanish”.
Places of articulation and manners of articulation are used more or less frequently depending on the language you use. The uvular (a place of articulation in the area of the soft palate) is used in Dutch and German but not in English, so English speakers using these languages may find it takes a bit of practice to articulate the sounds that require use of the uvular. The word “frau” in German can be tricky because that “r” is produced using the uvular.
It can be difficult to learn a new language because of these different ways to produce speech sounds. Spanish speakers sometimes struggle to sound an “s” in English without putting an e before it (“e-station”, “e-studio”); Japanese people often find the English l and r sounds extremely difficult to produce accurately, and native English speakers will probably find the “r” sound which appears in the Chinese word “ribenren” (“a Japanese person”) hard work to produce like native speaker.
