Velar consonant

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 in keen or cube) are sometimes referred to as palatovelars. Many languages also have labialized velars, such as , in which the articulation is accompanied by rounding of the lips. There are also labial–velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as . This distinction disappears with the approximant consonant since labialization involves adding of a labial approximant articulation to a sound, and 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:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	voiceless velar nasal	Burmese	/		'borrow'
	voiced velar nasal	English	ring		'ring'
	voiceless velar plosive	English	skip		'skip'
	voiced velar plosive	English	ago		'ago'
	voiceless velar affricate	Korean	크다/keuda		'big'
	voiced velar affricate	English	good		'good'
	voiceless velar fricative	German			'abdomen'
	voiced velar fricative	Greek			'cat'
	voiced velar approximant	Irish			'nine'
	voiceless labial-velar approximant	English	which		'which'
	voiced labio-velar approximant	English	witch		'witch'
	voiceless velar lateral affricate	Archi	/		'a flock'
	voiced velar lateral affricate	Hiw			'dolphin'
	voiceless velar lateral fricative	Wahgi	nòⱡ		'water'
	voiced velar lateral fricative	Archi			'blue'
	voiced velar lateral approximant	Wahgi	aʟaʟe		'dizzy'
	voiced velar lateral tap	Melpa
	velar ejective stop	Archi			'bottom'
	velar ejective affricate	Hadza			'to cradle'
	velar ejective fricative	Tlingit		<phonos file="Xʼáaxʼ.ogg"></phonos>	'apple'
	velar lateral ejective affricate	Sandawe			'sky'
	voiceless velar implosive	Uspantek			'cord/twine'
	voiced velar implosive	Sindhi	/		'heavy'
	velar-released click	Wolof (paralexical)	(allophonic with uvular )		'yes'

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 that has been analyzed as the realization of nasal vowels. No velar consonants have been found in data for Omurano, a language isolate of Peru. In Pirahã, men lack the only velar consonant.

Other languages lack simple velars. An areal feature of the indigenous languages of the Americas of the coastal regions of the Pacific Northwest is that historical *k was palatalized. When such sounds remained stops, they were transcribed Template:Angbr IPA in Americanist phonetic notation, presumably corresponding to IPA Template:Angbr IPA, but in others, such as the Saanich dialect of Coastal Salish, Salish-Spokane-Kalispel, and Chemakum, *k went further and affricated to . Likewise, historical *k’ has become and historical *x has become ; there was no *g or *ŋ. In the Northwest Caucasian languages, historical * has also become palatalized, becoming in Ubykh and in most Circassian varieties. In both regions the languages retain a labialized velar series (e.g. in the North Caucasus) as well as uvular consonants. In the languages of those families that retain plain velars, both the plain and labialized velars are pre-velar, perhaps to make them more distinct from the uvulars which may be post-velar. Prevelar consonants are susceptible to palatalization. A similar system, contrasting with and leaving marginal at best, is reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European.

Apart from the voiceless plosive , no other velar consonant is particularly common, even the and that occur in English. There can be no phoneme in a language that lacks voiced stops, like Mandarin Chinese, but it is sporadically missing elsewhere. Of the languages surveyed in the World Atlas of Language Structures, about 10% of languages that otherwise have are missing .

Pirahã has both a and a phonetically. However, the does not behave as other consonants, and the argument has been made that it is phonemically , leaving Pirahã with only as an underlyingly velar consonant.

Hawaiian does not distinguish from ; ⟨k⟩ tends toward at the beginning of utterances, before , and is variable elsewhere, especially in the dialect of Niʻihau and Kauaʻi. Since Hawaiian has no , and ⟨w⟩ varies between and , it is not clearly meaningful to say that Hawaiian has phonemic velar consonants.

Several Khoisan languages have limited numbers or distributions of pulmonic velar consonants. (Their click consonants are articulated in the uvular or possibly velar region, but that occlusion is part of the airstream mechanism rather than the place of articulation of the consonant.) Khoekhoe, for example, does not allow velars in medial or final position, but in Juǀʼhoan velars are rare even in initial position.

Velodorsal consonants

Normal velar consonants are dorso-velar: The dorsum (body) of the tongue rises to contact the velum (soft palate) of the roof of the mouth. In disordered speech there are also velo-dorsal stops, with the opposite articulation: The velum lowers to contact the tongue, which remains static. In the extensions to the IPA for disordered speech, these are transcribed by reversing the IPA letter for a velar consonant, e.g. Template:Angbr IPA for a voiceless velodorsal stop, Template:Angbr IPA for voiced, and Template:Angbr IPA for a nasal.

extIPA	HTML	Description
		Voiceless velodorsal plosive
		Voiced velodorsal plosive
		Velodorsal nasal

This convention will not work for the fricatives x and ɣ, though a downtack (Template:Angbr IPA, Template:Angbr IPA ~ Template:Angbr IPA) can be used to fill the gap.

See also

• Velarization
• Place of articulation
• List of phonetics topics

Further reading

• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.