Characteristics
Epiglottals are not known from many languages. However, this may partially be an effect of the difficulty European language-speaking linguists have in recognizing them; it is likely that supposedly pharyngeal consonants in many of the languages reported to possess them are in fact epiglottal in articulation. This was discovered to be the case for Dahalo, for example. Epiglottals are primarily known from the Middle East (in the Semitic languages) and from British Columbia (the "pharyngeal trills" in northern Haida are actually epiglottal), but also occur elsewhere, particularly in Northeast Caucasian languages such as Chechen. Nevertheless, epiglottal consonants are phonemically contrastive with pharyngeals only in the Richa dialect of Aghul, a Northeast Caucasian Lezgic language spoken in Dagestan: /ħaw/ "udder" vs. /ʜatʃ/ "apple"; /ʕan/ "belly" vs. /ʢakʷ/ "light".
In 1995 a new possible radical place of articulation, epiglotto-pharyngeal, was reported.
Read more about this topic: Epiglottal Consonant