Velopharyngeal fricative
| ʩ | |
|---|---|
| Pulmonic Consonant | |
| IPA: | ʩ |
| Z-SAMPA: | f\ |
| Place of Articulation: | Velopharyngeal |
| Manner of Articulation: | Fricative |
A velopharyngeal fricative is a snore- or snort-like phone articulated in an unusual way: by constricting the nasal passage with incomplete closure of the velum. As such, it is inherently nasalized. The sound's extIPA symbol - a digraph of f and ŋ - suggests the stereotypical articulation to be voiceless and with a velar closure as the oral part, but velopharyngeal friction can be combined with any phonation and buccal stop. A possible way to transcribe other variants may be appending a lowering diacritic to a nasal consonant: [m̞], [n̞] etc.
The sound is not used phonemically in any natlang (it is however a possible speech defect) nor in any known conlang in active development.
Contrast with other classes of nasal fricativs, the nareal fricatives (constricted at the nostrils) and nasalized fricatives (constricted orally).
