A voiced uvular plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is pronounced like a voiced velar plosive , except that the tongue makes contact not on the soft palate but on the uvula. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a small capital version of the Latin letter g.

is a rare sound, even compared to other uvulars. Vaux proposes a phonological explanation: uvular consonants normally involve a neutral or a retracted tongue root, whereas voiced stops often involve an advanced tongue root: two articulations that cannot physically co-occur. This leads many languages of the world to have a voiced uvular fricative instead as the voiced counterpart of the voiceless uvular plosive. Examples are Inuit; several Turkic languages such as Uyghur; several Northwest Caucasian languages such as Abkhaz; as well as several Northeast Caucasian languages such as Ingush.

Features

Features of a voiced uvular stop:

Occurrence

Uvular Language Word IPA Meaning Notes Arabic Sudanese 'cow' Corresponds to in Standard Arabic. See Arabic phonologyYemeni 'Khat' Some dialects. Corresponds to in Standard Arabic. See Arabic phonology Bugan Manlong dialect 'tilted, sloping, inclined' Has both plain and prenasalized variants. See Manlong Bugan phonology Low German Rügen dialect 'long' Ket 'cave in the ground' Allophone of after . Kwak'wala 'thank you' Lishan DidanUrmi Dialectבקא‎/baqqa'frog'Allophone of when between a vowel/sonorant and a vowel. Malto 'to tell' Allophone of after , is in Southern and Western dialects. See Malto language#Phonology. Mongolian 'Mongolian' Allophone of before back vowels, phonemic word-finally. Nivkh 'our dog' Allophone of Persian Iranian 'coffee' See Persian phonology. Somali 'Mogadishu' Allophone of . See Somali phonology Tabasaran 'he' (ergative) Tsakhur 'stone' Turkmen 'snow' An allophone of /ɡ/ next to back vowels Xumi Lower 'to stew' Slightly affricated; occurs only in a few words. Corresponds to the cluster in Upper Xumi.

Pre-uvular

There is also a voiced post-velar or pre-uvular plosiveInstead of "pre-uvular", it can be called "advanced uvular", "fronted uvular", "post-velar", "retracted velar" or "backed velar". For simplicity, this article uses only the term "pre-uvular". in some languages, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical uvular plosive, though not as front as the prototypical velar plosive. The International Phonetic Alphabet does not have a separate symbol for that sound, though it can be transcribed as , (symbol denotes an advanced ), or (both symbols denote a retracted ).

Language Word IPA Meaning Notes English Australian gaudy 'gaudy' Pre-uvular; allophone of before . See Australian English phonology Yanyuwa kuykurlu 'sacred' Pre-uvular. Contrasts plain and prenasalized versions

See also Index of phonetics articles

Notes

References

External links