Velar consonant

"Velar" redirects here. For the village in Rajasthan, India, see Velar (village).
Places of articulation
Tongue shape

Velars 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 (known also 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 before back vowels.

Palatalised 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 labial-velar consonants, which are doubly articulated at the velum and at the lips, such as [k͡p]. This distinction disappears with the approximant [w] 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: 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.[1]

The velar consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:

IPA Description Example
Language Orthography IPA Meaning
velar nasal English ring [ɹʷɪŋ] ring
voiceless velar stop English skip [skɪp] skip
voiced velar stop English get [ɡɛt] get
voiceless velar fricative German Bauch [baʊx] abdomen
voiced velar fricative Greek γάτα [ˈɣata] cat
voiceless labio-velar approximant English which[note 1] [ʍɪtʃ] which
velar approximant Spanish pagar[note 2] [paˈɰaɾ] to pay
velar lateral approximant Mid-Wahgi aʟaʟe [aʟaʟe] dizzy
voiced labio-velar approximant English witch [wɪtʃ] witch
kʼ velar ejective stop Archi кIан [kʼan] bottom
ɠ voiced velar implosive Sindhi g̈əro/ڳرو [ɠəro] heavy
ʞ back-released velar click (paralinguistic)

Lack of velars

The velar consonant [k] is the most common consonant in human languages.[2] The only languages recorded to lack velars (and any dorsal consonant at all) may be Xavante, Tahitian Wutung, Vanimo, and Nori.

Other languages lack simple velars. An areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical *k became palatalized in many languages. When such sounds remained stops there were transcribed ⟨kʸ⟩ in Americanist phonetic notation, presumably corresponding to IPA ⟨c⟩, but in others, such as Saanich, Salish, and Chemakum, *k went further and affricated to [tʃ]. Likewise, historical *k’ has become [tʃʼ] and historical *x has become [ʃ]; there was no *g or *ŋ. In the Northwest Caucasian languages, historical *[k] has also become palatalized, becoming /kʲ/ in Ubykh and /tʃ/ in most Circassian varieties. In both regions the languages retain a labiovelar series (e.g. [kʷ], [kʼʷ], [xʷ], [w] in the Pacific Northwest) as well as uvular consonants.[3] In the languages of those families that do retain plain velars, both the plain and labialized velars are actually pre-velar, perhaps to make them more distinct from the uvulars which may actually be post-velar. Prevelar consonants are susceptible to palatalization. A similar system, contrasting *kʲ with *kʷ and leaving *k marginal at best, is reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European.

Apart from the voiced stop [ɡ], no other velar consonant is particularly common, even the [w] and [ŋ] that occur in English. Of course, [ɡ] does not occur in languages that lack 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 [p b t d k] are missing [ɡ].[4]

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

Hawaiian does not distinguish [k] from ɛt]; ⟨k⟩ tends toward [k] at the beginning of utterances, ɛt] before [i], and is variable elsewhere, especially in the dialect of Niʻihau and Kauaʻi. Since Hawaiian has no [ŋ], and ⟨w⟩ varies between [w] and [v], 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 Juǀ'hoan 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. ⟨k⟩ for a voiceless velodorsal stop.[note 3]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ In dialects that distinguish between which and witch.
  2. ↑ Intervocalic g in Spanish often described instead as a very lightly articulated voiced velar fricative.
  3. ↑ The old letter for a velar click, turned-k ⟨ʞ⟩, was used from 2008 to 2015.

References

  1. ↑ The International phonetic Alphabet
  2. ↑ Ian Maddieson and Sandra Ferrari Disner, 1984, Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge University Press
  3. ↑ Viacheslav A. Chirikba, 1996, Common West Caucasian: the reconstruction of its phonological system and parts of its lexicon and morphology, p. 192. Research School CNWS: Leiden.
  4. ↑ The World Atlas of Language Structures Online:Voicing and Gaps in Plosive Systems

Bibliography

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