The voiceless velar plosive or stop is a type of

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 wit ...

al sound used in almost all

spoken language A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a si ...

s. The symbol in the

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that represents this sound is , and the equivalent

X-SAMPA The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and ...

symbol is k. The sound is a very common sound cross-linguistically. Most languages have at least a plain , and some distinguish more than one variety. Most

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, such as

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and

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, have a two-way contrast between aspirated and plain . Only a few languages lack a voiceless velar plosive, e.g. Tahitian and Mongolian. Some languages have the voiceless pre-velar plosive, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as front as the prototypical palatal plosive. Conversely, some languages have the voiceless post-velar plosive,Instead of "post-velar", it can be called "retracted velar", "backed velar", "pre-uvular", "advanced uvular" or "fronted uvular". which is articulated slightly behind the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as back as the prototypical uvular plosive.

Features

Features of the voiceless velar stop:

Varieties

Occurrence

Notes

References

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External links