The voiceless 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 X.

Features

Features of the voiceless 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 voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
• 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.

In other languages

Arabic and Hebrew are famous for their (though not all dialects of Arabic have it – the others use [x instead).

Several languages spoken on the northwest coast of North America have both labialized and non-labialized fricatives, including the Alsean, Salishan (Bella Coola, Klallam), Athabaskan (Chilcotin), and Wakashan languages (Nootka). Oowekyala, a Wakashan language, has labial and non-labial voiceless uvular fricatives in addition to having a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, and labial and non-labial velar fricatives.

The southwestern dialects of German realize the phoneme /x/ (spelled ch) as ^*; some others use it as an allophone of /x/ after .

This sound can also be found in Castilian dialects of Spanish (spelled j).

References

• Hess, Wolfgang (2001). "Funktionale Phonetik und Phonologie." In "Grundlagen der Phonetik." Bonn: Institut für Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. ^*

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Fricative consonants | Uvular consonants

Stimmloser uvularer Frikativ | Consonne fricative uvulaire sourde