The voiced uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is R. This consonant is one of several collectively called guttural R when found in European languages.

Because the IPA symbol stands for both the uvular fricative and the uvular approximant, the fricative nature of this sound may be specified by adding the uptack to the letter, . (The approximant can be specified by adding the downtack, .)

Features

Features of the voiced uvular fricative:

• Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
• Its place of articulation is uvular which means it is articulated with the back of the tongue (the dorsum) against or near the uvula.
• Its phonation type is voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

Occurs in

In Western Europe, a uvular trill or voiced fricative pronunciation of orthographic r spread from northern French to several dialects and registers of German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Hebrew, and Portuguese. However, not all of these remain either uvular or fricative today. In Standard German, r tends to be a uvular fricative or trill initially, but an uvular approximant between vowels, as in Ehre 'honour'; while in Danish the r is a pharyngeal approximant in all but the most conservative speech. In Brazilian Portuguese, r is usually a voiceless velar fricative , or a voiceless glottal fricative at the start of syllables.

It is used in some very rare dialects of Bengali as a version of the /r/ phoneme which occurs before velar consonants.

Armenian has a specific letter for this sound: 'Ր'.

Some phonemic transcriptions use the /r/ symbol instead of // for the 'r' sound for ease of typesetting.

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Fricative consonants | Approximants | Uvular consonants

Stimmhafter uvularer Frikativ | Consonne fricative uvulaire voisée | 有声口蓋垂摩擦音