The voiced velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages.
Some languages have the voiced pre-velar plosive,Instead of "pre-velar", it can be called "advanced velar", "fronted velar", "front-velar", "palato-velar", "post-palatal", "retracted palatal" or "backed palatal".
which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as front as the prototypical palatal plosive.
Conversely, some languages have the voiced post-velar plosive,Instead of "post-velar", it can be called "retracted velar", "backed velar", "pre-uvular", "advanced uvular" or "fronted uvular".
which is articulated slightly behind the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as back as the prototypical uvular plosive.
IPA symbol
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is g.
Strictly, the IPA symbol is the so-called single-storey G 10px, but the double-storey G 10px is considered an acceptable alternative.
The Unicode character  renders as either a single-storey G or a double-storey G depending on font; the character  is always a single-storey G, but it is generally available only in fonts with the IPA Extensions Unicode character block.
Features
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Features of the voiced velar stop: Occurrence
Of the six stops that would be expected from the most common pattern worldwide—that is, three places of articulation plus voicing ()— and  are the most frequently missing, being absent in about 10% of languages that otherwise have this pattern.
Absent stop  is an areal feature (see also Voiceless bilabial stop).
Missing , on the other hand, is widely scattered around the world, for example /ɡ/ is not a native phoneme of Belarusian, Dutch, Czech, Finnish or Slovak and occurs only in borrowed words in those languages.
A few languages, such as Modern Standard Arabic and part of the Levantine dialects (e.g. Lebanese and Syrian), are missing both, although most Modern Arabic dialects have  in their native phonemic systems as a reflex of  or less commonly of .
It seems that  is somewhat more difficult to articulate than the other basic stops.
Ian Maddieson speculates that this may be due to a physical difficulty in voicing velars: Voicing requires that air flow into the mouth cavity, and the relatively small space allowed by the position of velar consonants means that it will fill up with air quickly, making voicing difficult to maintain in  for as long as it is in  or .
This could have two effects:  and  might become confused, and the distinction is lost, or perhaps a  never develops when a language first starts making voicing distinctions.
With uvulars, where there is even less space between the glottis and tongue for airflow, the imbalance is more extreme: Voiced  is much rarer than voiceless .WALS Online : Chapter 5 – Voicing and Gaps in Plosive Systems
Many Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindustani, have a two-way contrast between aspirated and plain .
Examples
See also
Index of phonetics articles
Notes
References
External links
