The voiceless uvular plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is pronounced like ^*, except that the tongue makes contact not on the hard palate but on the uvula. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is q.

Features

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Features of the voiceless uvular plosive:

• Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
• 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

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Arabic and Syriac use this sound phonemically, and it is represented by the letters ﻕ (Qaf) and ܩ (Qōph), respectively, as in the names Iraq and Qatar. Specific dialects of Hebrew also have this sound, written with the letter ק (Qoph, which has a phonetic value of ^* in Israeli Hebrew). Kazakh and Uzbek represent this sound as Қ in the Cyrillic alphabet.

Uvular ^* is also found in nearly every language in the northwest of North America, as in Tlingit tree spine. It is also in Inuktitut, for example in explore (Inuktitut syllabary : ᐃ"ᐃᑉᕆᐅᖅᑐᖅ)

See also

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• List of phonetics topics

Uvular consonants

Stimmloser uvularer Plosiv | Consonne occlusive uvulaire sourde | Tonlös uvular klusil