Voiced pharyngeal fricative

The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\.

Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, ⟨⟩ is usually an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language is known to have a distinct fricative and approximant at this place of articulation. The approximant is sometimes specified as ⟨⟩ or as ⟨⟩.

Features
Features of the voiced pharyngeal approximant/fricative:

Occurrence
Pharyngeal consonants are not widespread. Sometimes, a pharyngeal approximant develops from a uvular approximant, as with the rhotic of Danish when it precedes. Many languages claiming to have pharyngeal fricatives or approximants turn out on closer inspection to have epiglottal consonants instead. For example, the candidate sound in Arabic and standard Hebrew (not modern Hebrew — Israelis of eastern European background generally pronounce this as a glottal stop) has been variously described as a voiced epiglottal fricative, an epiglottal approximant, or a pharyngealized glottal stop.