Pharyngeal consonant
consonant articulated through the pharynx
A pharyngeal consonant is a consonant that is articulated primarily in the pharynx. Some phoneticians distinguish upper-pharyngeal consonants (as they are in the extIPA) – also called "high" pharyngeals or radico-pharyngeals – pronounced by retracting the tongue root (the radix) in the mid to upper pharynx to make contact with the pharyngeal wall, and epiglottal consonants – also called "low" pharyngeals – which are pronounced either with the epiglottis making contact with the pharyngeal wall (epiglotto-pharyngeals), or with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis at the entrance of the larynx (aryepiglottals). Other phoneticians combine (upper-)pharyngeals and epiglottals – i.e. "high" and "low" pharyngeals – under a single place of articulation.
Stops and trills can be reliably produced only at the epiglottis, and fricatives can be reliably produced only in the upper pharynx. When they are treated as distinct places of articulation, the term radical consonant may be used as a cover term, or the term guttural consonants may be used instead.
Pharyngeal consonants can trigger effects on neighboring vowels. Instead of uvulars, which nearly always trigger retraction, pharyngeals tend to trigger lowering. For example, in Moroccan Arabic, pharyngeals tend to lower neighboring vowels (corresponding to the formant 1). In Chechen, it causes lowering as well, in addition to centralization and lengthening of the segment /a/.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pharyngeal consonant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.