Uvular consonant

Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and the symbol for the voiced fricative is used instead. Uvular affricates can certainly be made but are rare: they occur in some southern High-German dialects, as well as in a few African and Native American languages. (Ejective uvular affricates occur as realizations of uvular stops in Lillooet, Kazakh and Georgian.) Uvular consonants are typically incompatible with advanced tongue root, and they often cause retraction of neighboring vowels.Symbols to the right in a cell are voiced, to the left are voiceless. Shaded areas denote articulations judged impossible.Vowels beside dots are: unrounded • rounded Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be stops, fricatives, nasals, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and the symbol for the voiced fricative is used instead. Uvular affricates can certainly be made but are rare: they occur in some southern High-German dialects, as well as in a few African and Native American languages. (Ejective uvular affricates occur as realizations of uvular stops in Lillooet, Kazakh and Georgian.) Uvular consonants are typically incompatible with advanced tongue root, and they often cause retraction of neighboring vowels. The uvular consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are: English has no uvular consonants, and they are unknown in the indigenous languages of Australia and the Pacific, though uvular consonants separate from velar consonants are believed to have existed in the Proto-Oceanic language. Uvular consonants are however found in many African and Middle-Eastern languages, most notably Arabic, and in Native American languages. In parts of the Caucasus mountains and northwestern North America, nearly every language has uvular stops and fricatives. Two uvular R phonemes are found in various languages in north-western Europe including French, some Occitan dialects, a majority of German dialects, some Dutch dialects, and Danish. The voiceless uvular stop is transcribed as in both the IPA and SAMPA. It is pronounced somewhat like the voiceless velar stop , but with the middle of the tongue further back on the velum, against or near the uvula. The most familiar use will doubtless be in the transliteration of Arabic place names such as Qatar and Iraq into English, though, since English lacks this sound, this is generally pronounced as , the most similar sound that occurs in English. , the uvular ejective, is found in Georgian, Tlingit, Cusco Quechua, and some others. In Georgian, it is the only ejective without a non-ejective counterpart. This is due to /qʰ/ merging with /x/, leaving only the ejective. , the voiced equivalent of , is much rarer. It is like the voiced velar stop , but articulated in the same uvular position as . Few languages use this sound, but it is found in Persian and in several Northeast Caucasian languages, notably Tabasaran. It may also occur as an allophone of another uvular consonant - in Kazakh, the voiced uvular stop is an allophone of the voiced uvular fricative after the velar nasal. The voiceless uvular fricative is similar to the voiceless velar fricative , except that it is articulated near the uvula. It is found instead of in some dialects of German, Spanish and Arabic, and can be an allophone of /x/ in Georgian. Uvular flaps have been reported for Kube (Trans–New Guinea) and for the variety of Khmer spoken in Battambang. The Enqi dialect of the Bai language has an unusually complete series of uvular consonants consisting of the stops /q/, /qʰ/ and /ɢ/, the fricatives /χ/ and /ʁ/, and the nasal /ɴ/. All of these contrast with a corresponding velar consonant of the same manner of articulation. The existence of the uvular nasal is especially unusual, even more so than the existence of the voiced stop.