The voiceless upper-pharyngeal plosive or stop is a rare consonant.

Pharyngeal consonant A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Some phoneticians distinguish upper pharyngeal consonants, or "high" pharyngeals, pronounced by retracting the root of the tongue in the mid to upper pharynx, ...

s are typically pronounced at two regions of the

pharynx The pharynx (plural: pharynges) is the part of the throat behind the mouth and nasal cavity, and above the oesophagus and trachea (the tubes going down to the stomach and the lungs). It is found in vertebrates and invertebrates, though its struc ...

, upper and lower. The lower region is

epiglottal A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Some phoneticians distinguish upper pharyngeal consonants, or "high" pharyngeals, pronounced by retracting the root of the tongue in the mid to upper pharynx, ...

, so the upper region is often abbreviated as merely 'pharyngeal'. Among widespread speech sounds in the world's languages, the upper pharynx produces a voiceless

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

and a voiced sound that ranges from fricative to (more commonly)

approximant 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 ...

, . The epiglottal region produces the plosive as well as sounds that range from fricative to

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 custom ...

, and . Because the latter pair is most often trilled and rarely simply fricative, these consonants have been classified together as simply pharyngeal, and distinguished as plosive, fricative/approximant and trill. No language is known to have a phonemic upper pharyngeal plosive. The

Nǁng language Nǁng or Nǁŋǃke, commonly known by the name of its dialect Nǀuu (Nǀhuki), is a moribund Tuu (Khoisan) language once spoken in South Africa. It is no longer spoken on a daily basis, as the speakers live in different villages. The dialect ...

(Nǀuu) is claimed to have an upper pharyngeal place of articulation among its

click consonant Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...

s: clicks in Nǁng have a rear closure that is said to vary between uvular or upper pharyngeal, depending on the

click type Click consonants, or clicks, are speech sounds that occur as consonants in many languages of Southern Africa and in three languages of East Africa. Examples familiar to English-speakers are the '' tut-tut'' (British spelling) or '' tsk! tsk!'' ...

. However, if the place were truly pharyngeal, they could not occur as nasal clicks, which they do. Otherwise upper pharyngeal plosives are only known from disordered speech. They appear for example in the speech of some children with cleft palate, as compensatory backing of stops to avoid nasalizing them. The

extIPA 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 Internatio ...

provides the letter (a small-capital ), to transcribe such a voiceless upper pharyngeal plosive.Duckworth et al. (1990)
Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for the transcription of atypical speech.
''Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics'' 4: 4 p. 275

Features

Features of the voiceless upper-pharyngeal stop:

References

{{reflist Pharyngeal consonants Voiceless stops Voiceless oral consonants