Velar consonant
consonant articulated with the back part of the tongue
Velar consonants are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (also known as the "velum").
Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive and the movements of the dorsum
are not very precise, velars easily undergo assimilation, shifting their articulation back or to the front
depending on the quality of adjacent vowels. They often become automatically fronted, that is partly or completely palatal before a following front vowel, and retracted, that is partly or completely uvular before back vowels.
Palatalised or advanced velars (like English /k/ in keen or cube) are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as [kʷ], in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also similarly named but distinct labial–velars, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as [k͡p]. This distinction disappears with the approximant [w], where the labialization can be interpreted as either a secondary or double articulation; as such, this ambiguous situation is often called labiovelar.
A velar trill or tap is not possible according to the International Phonetics Association: see the shaded boxes on the table of pulmonic consonants. In the velar position, the tongue has an extremely restricted ability to carry out the type of motion associated with trills or taps, and the body of the tongue has no freedom to move quickly enough to produce a velar trill or flap.
Examples
Some velar consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:
Lack of velars
The only languages recorded to lack phonemic velars (and any dorsal consonant at all) include Xavante, standard Tahitian (though /tVt/ is pronounced [kVt], a pattern also found in the Niihau dialect of Hawaiian), and arguably several Skou languages (Wutung, the Dumo dialect of Vanimo, and Bobe), which have a coda [ŋ] that has been analyzed as the realization of nasal vowels.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Velar consonant” as consonant articulated with the back part of the tongue. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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This entry incorporates text from “Velar 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.