Velars are
consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...
s
articulated
An articulated vehicle is a vehicle which has a permanent or semi-permanent pivot joint in its construction, allowing it to turn more sharply. There are many kinds, from heavy equipment to buses, trams and trains. Steam locomotives were sometim ...
with the back part of the
tongue
The tongue is a muscular organ in the mouth of a typical tetrapod. It manipulates food for mastication and swallowing as part of the digestive process, and is the primary organ of taste. The tongue's upper surface (dorsum) is covered by taste ...
(the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the
velum
Velum may refer to:
Human anatomy
* Superior medullary velum, anterior medullary velum or valve of Vieussens, white matter, in the brain, which stretches between the superior cerebellar peduncles
** Frenulum of superior medullary velum, a sligh ...
).
Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum
are not very precise, velars easily undergo
assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front
depending on the quality of adjacent vowels.
They often become automatically ''fronted'', that is partly or completely
palatal
The palate () is the roof of the mouth in humans and other mammals. It separates the oral cavity from the nasal cavity.
A similar structure is found in crocodilians, but in most other tetrapods, the oral and nasal cavities are not truly separ ...
before a following front vowel, and ''retracted'', that is partly or completely
uvular
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 prov ...
before back vowels.
Palatalised velars (like English in ''keen'' or ''cube'') are sometimes referred to as palatovelars.
Many languages also have
labialized
Labialization is a secondary articulatory feature of sounds in some languages. Labialized sounds involve the lips while the remainder of the oral cavity produces another sound. The term is normally restricted to consonants. When vowels involve ...
velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also
labial–velar consonant
Labial–velar consonants are doubly articulated at the velum and the lips, such as . They are sometimes called "labiovelar consonants", a term that can also refer to labialized velars, such as the stop consonant and the approximant .
Labial- ...
s, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappears with the
approximant consonant
Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
since labialization involves adding of a labial approximant articulation to a sound, and this ambiguous situation is often called labiovelar.
A velar
trill
TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links) is an Internet Standard implemented by devices called TRILL switches. TRILL combines techniques from bridging and routing, and is the application of link-state routing to the VLAN-aware cus ...
or
tap is not possible according to the
International Phonetics Association
The International Phonetic Association (IPA; French: ', ''API'') is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA's major contribution to phonetics is the Interna ...
: see the shaded boxes on the
table of pulmonic consonants. In the velar position, the tongue has an extremely restricted ability to carry out the type of motion associated with trills or taps, and the body of the tongue has no freedom to move quickly enough to produce a
velar trill
In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the active articulator and passive articulator. Standard Spanish as in , for example, is an alveolar trill.
A trill is made by the articulator being held in place an ...
or flap.
Examples
The velar consonants identified by the
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
are:
Lack of velars
The velar consonant is the most common consonant in human languages. The only languages recorded to lack velars (and any dorsal consonant at all) may be
Xavante
The Xavante (also Shavante, Chavante, Akuen, A'uwe, Akwe, Awen, or Akwen) are an indigenous people, comprising 15,315 individuals within the territory of eastern Mato Grosso state in Brazil. They speak the Xavante language, part of the Jê lang ...
,
Tahitian, and (phonologically but not phonetically) several
Skou languages
The Sko or Skou languages are a small language family spoken by about 7000 people, mainly along the Vanimo coast of Sandaun Province in Papua New Guinea, with a few being inland from this area and at least one just across the border in the Indone ...
(
Wutung, a dialect of
Vanimo
Vanimo is the capital of Sandaun Province (West Sepik) in north-westernmost Papua New Guinea and of Vanimo-Green River District. It is located on a peninsula close to the border with Indonesia.
Religion
Its Holy Cross Pro-Cathedral is the epi ...
, and
Bobe). In
Pirahã, men may lack the only velar consonant.
Other languages lack simple velars. An areal feature of the
indigenous languages of the Americas
Over a thousand indigenous languages are spoken by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. These languages cannot all be demonstrated to be related to each other and are classified into a hundred or so language families (including a large numbe ...
of the coastal regions of the
Pacific Northwest
The Pacific Northwest (sometimes Cascadia, or simply abbreviated as PNW) is a geographic region in western North America bounded by its coastal waters of the Pacific Ocean to the west and, loosely, by the Rocky Mountains to the east. Tho ...
is that historical *k was palatalized. When such sounds remained stops, they were transcribed in
Americanist phonetic notation
Americanist phonetic notation, also known as the North American Phonetic Alphabet (NAPA), the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet or the American Phonetic Alphabet (APA), is a system of phonetic notation originally developed by European and American ...
, presumably corresponding to IPA , but in others, such as the
Saanich dialect of
Coastal Salish
The Coast Salish is a group of ethnically and linguistically related Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, living in the Canadian province of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon. They speak one of the Coa ...
,
Salish-Spokane-Kalispel, and
Chemakum
The Chimakum, also spelled Chemakum and Chimacum are a near extinct Native American people (known to themselves as Aqokúlo and sometimes called the Port Townsend Indians), who lived in the northeastern portion of the Olympic Peninsula in Washin ...
, *k went further and affricated to . Likewise, historical *k’ has become and historical *x has become ; there was no *g or *ŋ. In the
Northwest Caucasian languages, historical * has also become palatalized, becoming in
Ubykh and in most
Circassian varieties. In both regions the languages retain a
labialized velar series (e.g. in the Pacific Northwest) as well as
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 p ...
s. In the languages of those families that retain plain velars, both the plain and labialized velars are ''pre-velar'', perhaps to make them more distinct from the uvulars which may be ''post-velar''. Prevelar consonants are susceptible to palatalization. A similar system, contrasting with and leaving marginal at best, is reconstructed for
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
.
Apart from the voiced stop , no other velar consonant is particularly common, even the and that occur in English. Of course, there can be no phoneme in a language that lacks voiced stops, like
Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of ...
, but it is sporadically missing elsewhere. Of the languages surveyed in the ''World Atlas of Language Structures'', about 10% of languages that otherwise have are missing .
The World Atlas of Language Structures Online:Voicing and Gaps in Plosive Systems
/ref>
Pirahã has both a and a phonetically. However, the does not behave as other consonants, and the argument has been made that it is phonemically , leaving Pirahã with only as an underlyingly velar consonant.
Hawaiian does not distinguish from ; tends toward at the beginning of utterances, before , and is variable elsewhere, especially in the dialect of Niihau and Kauai. Since Hawaiian has no , and varies between and , it is not clearly meaningful to say that Hawaiian has phonemic velar consonants.
Several Khoisan languages
The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of ...
have limited numbers or distributions of pulmonic velar consonants. (Their click consonants are articulated in the uvular or possibly velar region, but that occlusion is part of the airstream mechanism
In phonetics, the airstream mechanism is the method by which airflow is created in the vocal tract. Along with phonation and articulation, it is one of three main components of speech production. The airstream mechanism is mandatory for sound pr ...
rather than the place of articulation of the consonant.) Khoekhoe
Khoekhoen (singular Khoekhoe) (or Khoikhoi in the former orthography; formerly also '' Hottentots''"Hottentot, n. and adj." ''OED Online'', Oxford University Press, March 2018, www.oed.com/view/Entry/88829. Accessed 13 May 2018. Citing G. S. ...
, for example, does not allow velars in medial or final position, but in Juǀ'hoan velars are rare even in initial position.
consonants
Normal velar consonants are ''dorso-velar'': The dorsum (body) of the tongue rises to contact the velum (soft palate) of the roof of the mouth. In disordered speech there are also ''velo-dorsal'' stops, with the opposite articulation: The velum lowers to contact the tongue, which remains static. In the extensions to the IPA
The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internati ...
for disordered speech, these are transcribed by reversing the IPA letter for a velar consonant, e.g. ⟨⟩ for a voiceless velodorsal stop, ⟨⟩ for voiced, and ⟨⟩ for nasal.
See also
* Velarization
Velarization is a secondary articulation of consonants by which the back of the tongue is raised toward the velum during the articulation of the consonant.
In the International Phonetic Alphabet, velarization is transcribed by one of four di ...
* Place of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is a location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a passive articula ...
* List of phonetics topics
A
* Acoustic phonetics
* Active articulator
* Affricate
* Airstream mechanism
* Alexander John Ellis
* Alexander Melville Bell
* Alfred C. Gimson
* Allophone
* Alveolar approximant ()
* Alveolar click ()
* Alveolar consonant
* Alveolar ej ...
Notes
References
Further reading
*
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Place of articulation