A voiceless epiglottal fricative, or voiceless pharyngeal trill, is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , a small capital ; it is homoglyphic with the lowercase Cyrillic letter En (н).
Although the official name in the IPA for this sound has always been a voiceless epiglottal fricative since it was introduced in 1989, laryngoscopic studies by John Esling have found that both epiglottal and pharyngeal consonants are pharyngeal in place of articulation, and are affected in manner by the aryepiglottic folds and larynx height; he therefore proposed the reclassification of as the trilled counterpart of , noting both as fricatives, and later described realizations of ranging from a fricative, to a trill, to a fricative trill. Esling furthered this reclassification with a modified version of the IPA chart, merging pharyngeal and epiglottal consonants into a single column, placing as a trill and as a fricative.
Features
Features of a voiceless epiglottal fricative:
Occurrence
{| class="wikitable"
! colspan="2" | Language !! Word !! IPA !! Meaning !! Notes
|-
| colspan="2" | Agul || || || 'whey' ||
|-
| colspan="2" | Amis || || || 'spouse' || The epiglottal consonants in Amis have proven hard to describe, with some describing it not as epiglottal, but a pharyngeal fricative or even as a uvular consonant. See Amis phonology
|-
| Arabic || Iraqi ||
|[ʜaj]||'alive'
| Corresponds to in Standard Arabic. See Arabic phonology
|-
| colspan="2" | Bengali || || || 'straw' || Mainly realized as such in very eastern regions; often also debuccalized or phonetically realised as . Corresponds to in western and central dialects. See Bengali phonology
|-
| colspan="2" | Chechen || || || 'you' ||
|-
| colspan="2" | Dahalo || || || 'arrow' ||
|-
| colspan="2" | Haida || || || 'shadow' ||
|-
| colspan="2" | Somali
|
|
|'bubble'
|Realization of /ħ/ for some speakers.