Voiceless upper-pharyngeal plosive

A voiceless upper-pharyngeal plosive or stop is a rare consonant. No language is known to have a phonemic upper pharyngeal plosive. The Nǁng language (Nǀuu) is claimed to have an upper pharyngeal place of articulation among its click consonants— clicks in Nǁng have a rear closure that is said to vary between uvular or upper pharyngeal, depending on the click type. However, if the place were truly pharyngeal, they could not occur as nasal clicks, which they do.

Otherwise, upper pharyngeal plosives are only known from disordered speech. They appear for example in the speech of some children with cleft palate, as compensatory backing of stops to avoid nasalizing them. The extIPA provides the letter ⟨ꞯ⟩ (a small capital Q), equivalent to IPA ⟨q᫢⟩ or ⟨q̠⟩ (a retracted ⟨q⟩) to transcribe such a sound.

Pharyngeal and epiglottal consonants are pronounced in the upper and lower pharynx, respectively, and because of this they are often labeled "upper pharyngeal" and "lower pharyngeal". If the consonants labeled as epiglottal fricatives in the International Phonetic Alphabet chart, [ʜ ʢ], are analyzed as trills, which they generally are phonetically, then all three epiglottal letters fit in gaps in the pharyngeal column of the consonant table in the chart. This has led phoneticians such as John Esling to propose merging the epiglottal consonants into the pharyngeal column of the chart.