Voiced uvular fricative: Encyclopedia - Voiced uvular fricative

Voiced uvular fricative

The voiced 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 ʁ, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is R. This consonant is one of several collectively called guttural R when found in European languages.

Because the IPA symbol stands for both the uvular fricative and the uvular approximant, the fricative nature of this sound may be specified by adding the uptack to the letter, [ʁ̝]. (The approximant can be specified by adding the downtack, [ʁ̞].)

Voiced uvular fricative - Features

Features of the voiced 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 voiced, which means the vocal cords are vibrating during the articulation.
• 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.

Voiced uvular fricative - Occurs in

In Western Europe, a voiced uvular trill or fricative pronunciation of orthographic r spread from northern French to several dialects and registers of German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Hebrew. However, not all of these are either uvular or fricative today. In Standard German, r tends to be a uvular fricative or trill initially, but an uvular approximant between vowels, as in Ehre [eʁ̞ə] 'honor'; while in Danish the r is a pharyngeal approximant in all but the most conservative speech.

A voiced uvular fricative is also found in many varieties of European Portuguese for orthographic rr or initial r, as in the name of the city Rio de Janeiro.

Some phonemic transcriptions use the /r/ symbol instead of /ʁ/ for the 'r' sound for ease of typesetting.

See also

• List of phonetics topics

Categories: Pages containing IPA | Fricative | Approximant | Uvular | Guttural R

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Voiced uvular fricative", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki