A voiceless uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound that is used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is either a Latin or Greek-style chi, . The historical IPA symbol for this sound was , a turned small capital R, and was officially changed to in 1928. In Americanist phonetic notation the sound is represented by (ex with underdot), or sometimes by (ex with caron). In broad transcription it may be transcribed , or if rhotic.
Features
Features of a voiceless uvular fricative:
Occurrence
{| class="wikitable"
! colspan=2 | Language !! Word !! IPA !! Meaning !! Notes
|-
| colspan=2 | Afrikaans
|
|
| 'good'
| Varies between a fricative and a fricative trill when word-initial.
|
|
| 'roof'
| Appears only after certain back vowels. See Standard German phonology
|-
| Chemnitz dialect
|
|
| 'skirt'
| In free variation with , , and . Does not occur in coda.
|-
| Lower Rhine
|
|
| 'hosts'
| In free variation with between a vowel and a voiceless coronal consonant.
|-
| colspan="2" | Hebrew
| /
|
| 'king'
| Usually a fricative trill. See Modern Hebrew phonology.
|-
| colspan=2 | Luxembourgish
|
|
| 'train'
| See Luxembourgish phonology.
|-
| Portuguese
| General Brazilian
|
|
| 'rupture' (noun)
| Some dialects, corresponds to rhotic consonant . See Portuguese phonology.
|-
| colspan="2" | Ripuarian
|
|
| 'eight'
| Allophone of after back vowels. Fronted to or after front vowels and consonants. It may be transcribed in IPA with . See Colognian phonology, Kerkrade dialect phonology and Hard and soft G in Dutch
|-
| Spanish
| Ponce dialect
|
|
| 'dog'
| This and are the primary realizations of in this dialect. The fricative-trill can be transcribed as (a devoiced and raised uvular trill) in IPA. It is found as either the fortis counterpart of (which itself is voiceless at least in Northern Standard Dutch: ) or the sole dorsal fricative in Northern SD and regional dialects and languages of the Netherlands (Dutch Low Saxon and West Frisian) spoken above the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Waal (sometimes termed the Rotterdam–Nijmegen Line). A plain fricative that is articulated slightly further front, as either medio-velar or post-palatal is typical of dialects spoken south of the rivers (mainly Brabantian and Limburgish but excluding Ripuarian and the dialect of Bergen op Zoom), including Belgian SD. In those dialects, the voiceless uvular fricative trill is one of the possible realizations of the phoneme . See Hard and soft G in Dutch for more details.
The frication in the fricative trill variant sometimes occurs at the middle or the back of the soft palate (termed velar or mediovelar and post-velar, respectively), rather than the uvula itself. This is the case in Northern Standard Dutch as well as some varieties of Arabic, Limburgish and Madrid Spanish. It may thus be appropriate to call those variants voiceless (post)velar-uvular fricative trill as the trill component is always uvular (velar trills are not physically possible). The corresponding IPA symbol is (a devoiced, raised and advanced uvular trill, where the "advanced" diacritic applies only to the fricative portion of the sound). Thus, in cases where a dialectal variation between voiceless uvular and velar fricatives is claimed the main difference between the two may be the trilling of the uvula as frication can be velar in both cases - compare Northern Dutch acht 'eight' (with a postvelar-uvular fricative trill) with Southern Dutch or , which features a non-trilled fricative articulated at the middle or front of the soft palate.
|
|
| 'good'
| Varies between a fricative and a fricative trill when word-initial.