Voiced uvular plosive

A voiced uvular plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. It is pronounced like a voiced velar plosive [ɡ], except that the tongue makes contact not on the soft palate but on the uvula. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɢ⟩, a small capital version of the Latin letter g.

[ɢ] is a rare sound, even compared to other uvulars. Vaux proposes a phonological explanation: uvular consonants normally involve a neutral or a retracted tongue root, whereas voiced stops often involve an advanced tongue root: two articulations that cannot physically co-occur. This leads many languages of the world to have a voiced uvular fricative [ʁ] instead as the voiced counterpart of the voiceless uvular plosive. Examples are Inuit; several Turkic languages such as Uyghur; several Northwest Caucasian languages such as Abkhaz; as well as several Northeast Caucasian languages such as Ingush.