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. Uvular consonants are less common than velars. They may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, 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.

The uvular consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
Xsampa-Nslash.png	uvular nasal	Japanese	日本 Nihon	[]	Japan
Xsampa-q.png	voiceless uvular plosive	Kazakh	Қазақ Qazaq	[]	Kazakh
Xsampa-Gslash.png	voiced uvular plosive	Inuktitut	utirama		because I return
Xsampa-x2.png	voiceless uvular fricative	Castilian Spanish	hijo		son
Xsampa-R2.png	voiced uvular fricative	Lakhota (LLC orthography)	aúyapi	[]	bread
Xsampa-Rslash.png	uvular trill	French	Paris	[]	Paris
IPA_uvular_ejective.png	uvular ejective	Cusco Quechua	q'allu	[]	tomato sauce
Xsampa-Gslash_lessthan.png	voiced uvular implosive	Mam	[]	fire

There are no uvular consonants in English. Uvular consonants are 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 Rs are found in north-western Europe, where they spread from northern French.

The voiceless uvular plosive is transcribed as in both the IPA and SAMPA. It is pronounced somewhat like the voiceless velar plosive , but with the middle of the tongue further back, against the uvula rather than the velum. 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 voiced equivalent of , is much rarer. It is like the voiced velar plosive , but articulated in the same uvular position as . Few languages use this sound, but it is found in some varieties of Persian and in several Northeast Caucasian languages, notably Tabasaran.

The voiceless uvular fricative is similar to the voiceless velar fricative , except that it is articulated on the uvula. It is found instead of in some dialects of German and Arabic.

The Tlingit language of the Alaskan Panhandle has ten uvular consonants:

tenuis plosive		tree spine
aspirated plosive		basket
ejective stop		screech owl
labialized tenuis plosive		octopus
labialized aspirated plosive		people, tribe
labialized ejective stop		cooking pot
voiceless fricative		fingernail
ejective fricative		freshwater sockeye salmon
labialized voiceless fricative		canvas, denim
labialized ejective fricative		down (feathers)

and the Ubykh language of Turkey has 20.

The Three Uvular Rs

The uvular trill is used in certain dialects of French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Swedish and Norwegian, as well as Hebrew, for the letter respectively the rhotic phoneme. In many of these it has the voiced and/or voiceless uvular fricative as an allophone when it follows one of the voiceless stops , , or at the end of a word, as in maître ..

As with most trills, uvular trills are often reduced to a single contact, especially between vowels.

Unlike other uvular consonants, the uvular trill is articulated without a retraction of the tongue, and therefore doesn't lower neighboring high vowels the way uvular stops commonly do.

Several other languages, including Inuktitut, Abkhaz and some varieties of Arabic, have a voiced uvular fricative but do not treat it as an r.

In Lakhota the uvular trill is an allophone of the voiced uvular fricative before .

See also

*place of articulation
*list of phonetics topics
*Guttural R