Voiceless uvular fricative

The voiceless uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is χ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is X.

Features

Features of the voiceless uvular fricative:

• Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
• Its place of articulation is uvular which means it is articulated with the back of the tongue (the dorsum) against or near the uvula.
• Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

In other languages

The voiceless uvular fricative occurs in several languages.

Several languages spoken on the northwest coast of North America have both labialized and non-labialized fricatives, including the Alsean, Salishan (Bella Coola, Klallam), Athabaskan (Chilcotin), and Wakashan languages (Nootka). Oowekyala, a Wakashan language, has labial and non-labial voiceless uvular fricatives in addition to having a voiceless pharyngeal fricative, and labial and non-labial velar fricatives.

German

This article or section should be merged with German phonology.

Many German dialects have the voiceless uvular fricative as an allophone corresponding to the grapheme <ch>, as in ach [aχ] (the interjection "oh!"), called ach-Laut in German. The ach-Laut can be pronounced either as a voiceless uvular fricative or a voiceless velar fricative, depending on factors such as emphasis. It may also be argued that a uvular ach-Laut occurs after short <o>, as in doch [dɔχ].

The ach-Laut is the sound represented by <ch> when it follows <a>, <o>, <u>, or the diphthong <au> (in most cases). The sound represented by <ch> before or following <e>, <i>, <ä>, <ö>, <ü>, the diphthongs <eu> or <äu>, or following the consonants <l>, <n> or <r> is the voiceless palatal fricative, considered by German speakers to be a different consonant, the ich-Laut.

The frequently-used diminutive suffix <-chen>, always pronunced with an ich-Laut, may exceptionally result in the cluster [-χˌçən] when [-χ] ends a syllable that doesn't get umlauted (that is, an unstressed syllable). Similarly, tauchen ("to dive") is a homograph of Tauchen (diminutive of "rope"), but the differing syllable boundaries are revealed by their different pronunciations: tauchen is [taʊχˌən], while Tauchen is [taʊˌçən].

References

• Hess, Wolfgang (2001). "Funktionale Phonetik und Phonologie." In "Grundlagen der Phonetik." Bonn: Institut für Kommunikationsforschung und Phonetik, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. [1]

See also

• List of phonetics topics