Voiced Pharyngeal Fricative

Voiced Pharyngeal Fricative

The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʕ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\.

Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, ⟨ʕ⟩ is usually an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language is known to make a phonemic distinction between fricatives and approximants at this place of articulation. The approximant is sometimes specified as ⟨ʕ̞⟩ or as ⟨ɑ̯⟩.