velar

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.

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 plosive	English	skip	[skɪp]	skip
	voiced velar plosive	English	get	[gɛt]	get
	voiceless velar fricative	German	Bauch	[baʊx]	abdomen
	voiced velar fricative	Greek	ɣata	[ɣata]	cat
	voiceless labial-velar approximant	English	which[1]	[ʍɪtʃ]	which
	velar approximant	Spanish	pagar[2]	[paɰaɾ]	to pay
	velar lateral approximant	Mid-Wahgi	aʟaʟe	[aʟaʟe]	dizzy
	labial-velar approximant	English	witch	[wɪtʃ]	witch

It is important to note at this point that a velar trill or tap is not possible - see the shaded boxes on the consonant table at the bottom. In the velar position the tongue has an extremely restricted ability to carry out the type of motion associated with trills or taps. Nor does the body of the tongue have the freedom to move quickly enough to produce a velar trill or flap.^[3]

Lack of velars

The velar consonant [k] is the most common consonant in human languages.^[4] The only languages recorded to lack velars—indeed, to lack any dorsal consonant at all—may be Xavante and Tahitian. However, there are other languages which lack simple velars. An areal feature of the Pacific Northwest coast is that historical *k has become palatalized in many languages, in many languages becoming [kʲ], but in others, such as Saanich, Salish, and Chemakun becoming [tʃ]. (Likewise, historical *k’ has become [tʃʼ] and historical *x has become [ʃ]; there was no *g or *ŋ.) However, all three languages retain a labiovelar series [kʷ], [kʼʷ], [xʷ], [w], as well as a uvular series.

Apart from [ɡ], none of the other velars are particularly common, not even [w] and [ŋ], which occur in English. [ɡ] of course does not occur in languages like Mandarin Chinese which lack voiced stops, but it is sporadically missing elsewhere. Of the languages surveyed in the World Atlas of Language Structures, about 10% of languages which otherwise have [p b t d k], such as Modern Standard Arabic, are missing [ɡ].^[5]

The Pirahã language 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 [t]; the sound spelled k tends toward [k] at the beginnings of utterances, [t] before [i], and is variable elsewhere, especially in the dialect of Niʻihau and Kauaʻi. Since Hawaiian has no [ŋ], and w similarly varies between [w] and labial [v], it's not clear that it is meaningful to say that Hawaiian has velar consonants.

Notes

References

• Ladefoged, Peter; Ian Maddieson (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19814-8. 

See also

• Place of articulation
• List of phonetics topics