The voiced 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, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

al sound used in many spoken

language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

s. Some languages have the voiced 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 voiced post-velar plosive, which is articulated slightly behind the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as back as the prototypical uvular plosive.

IPA symbol

The symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

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 g. Strictly, the IPA symbol is the so-called single-storey G Opentail g

, but the double-storey G Looptail g

is considered an acceptable alternative. The Unicode character renders as either a single-storey G or a double-storey G depending on font; the character is always a single-storey G, but it is generally available only in fonts supporting the

IPA Extensions IPA Extensions is a block (U+0250–U+02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs ...

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

character block.

Features

Features of the voiced velar stop:

Varieties

Occurrence

Of the six stops that would be expected from the most common pattern worldwide—that is, three places of articulation plus voicing ()— and are the most frequently missing, being absent in about 10% of languages that otherwise have this pattern. Absent stop is an

areal feature In geolinguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area, particularly when such features are not descended from a common ancestor or proto-language. An areal feature is contrasted with genetic relatio ...

(see also Voiceless bilabial stop). Missing , (when the language uses voicing to contrast stops) on the other hand, is widely scattered around the world, for example /ɡ/ is not a native phoneme of Belarusian, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Czech, and Slovak and occurs only in borrowed words in those languages. A few languages, such as

Modern Standard Arabic Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Written Arabic (MWA) is the variety of Standard language, standardized, Literary language, literary Arabic that developed in the Arab world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and in some usages al ...

and part of the Levantine dialects (e.g. Lebanese and

Syrian Syrians () are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, most of whom have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend ...

), are missing both, although most of the other

Arabic dialects Varieties of Arabic (or dialects or vernaculars) are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. Arabic is a Semitic languages, Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic family that originated in the Arabian P ...

have in their native phonemic systems as a reflex of or less commonly of . It seems that is somewhat more difficult to articulate than the other basic stops.

Ian Maddieson Ian Maddieson (1 September 1942 – 2 February 2025) was a British-American Linguistics, linguist and professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico. He is best known for his work in phonetics and phonological Linguistic typolo ...

speculates that this may be due to a physical difficulty in voicing velars: Voicing requires that air flow into the mouth cavity, and the relatively small space allowed by the position of velar consonants means that it will fill up with air quickly, making voicing difficult to maintain in for as long as it is in or . This could have two effects: and might become confused, and the distinction is lost, or perhaps a never develops when a language first starts making voicing distinctions. With uvulars, where there is even less space between the

glottis The glottis (: glottises or glottides) is the opening between the vocal folds (the rima glottidis). The glottis is crucial in producing sound from the vocal folds. Etymology From Ancient Greek ''γλωττίς'' (glōttís), derived from ''γ ...

and tongue for airflow, the imbalance is more extreme: Voiced is much rarer than voiceless .WALS Online
Chapter 5 – Voicing and Gaps in Plosive Systems
In many

Indo-Aryan languages The Indo-Aryan languages, or sometimes Indic languages, are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of 2024, there are more than 1.5 billion speakers, primarily concentrated east ...

, such as Hindustani, plain and aspirated ^hare in

contrastive distribution Contrastive may refer to one of several concepts in linguistics: *Contrast (linguistics) *Contrastive linguistics *Contrastive distribution *Contrastive analysis *Contrastive rhetoric *Contrastive focus reduplication *Contrastive stress *Contrastiv ...

Notes

References

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External links

* {{IPA navigation Velar consonants Plosives Pulmonic consonants Voiced oral consonants Central consonants