Voiced velar approximant

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

The consonant is absent in English, but may be approximated by making but with the tongue body lowered or  but with the lips apart. The voiced velar approximant can in many cases be considered the semivocalic counterpart of the close back unrounded vowel. ⟨ɰ⟩ and ⟨ɯ̯⟩ with the non-syllabic diacritic are used in different transcription systems to represent the same sound.

In some languages, such as Spanish, the voiced velar approximant is an allophone of – see below.

The symbol for the velar approximant originates from ⟨ɯ⟩, but with a vertical line. Compare ⟨u⟩ and ⟨ɥ⟩ for the labio-palatal approximant.

Features
Features of the voiced velar approximant:

The most common type of this approximant is glide or semivowel. The term glide emphasizes the characteristic of movement (or 'glide') of from the  vowel position to a following vowel position. The term semivowel emphasizes that, although the sound is vocalic in nature, it is not 'syllabic' (it does not form the nucleus of a syllable). For a description of the approximant consonant variant used e.g. in Spanish, see below.

Voiced velar bunched approximant
Some languages have a velar approximant that is produced with the body of the tongue bunched up at the velum and simultaneous pharyngealization. This gives rise to a type of retroflex resonance resembling. The extension to the IPA recommends the use of the "centralized" diacritic combined with the IPA sign for the alveolar approximant (as in ⟨ɹ̈⟩) to distinguish the bunched realization from the prototypical apical, which may be specified as ⟨ɹ̺⟩. Typically, the diacritic is omitted, so that the sound is transcribed simply with ⟨ɹ⟩ or ⟨ɻ⟩ (in broader transcriptions: ⟨r⟩), as if it were a coronal consonant. Just as described below, the velar bunched approximant is not specified for rounding.

In Dutch, this type of r is called Gooise r 'Gooi r'. It is named after het Gooi, a region of the Netherlands where Hilversum (the main centre for television and radio broadcasting) is located.

Features
Features of the voiced velar bunched approximant:

The body of the tongue is bunched up at the velum, rather than just approaching it as it is the case with the prototypical velar approximant.

Relation with and
Some languages have a voiced velar approximant that is unspecified for rounding, and therefore cannot be considered the semivocalic equivalent of either or its rounded counterpart. Examples of such languages are Catalan, Galician and Spanish, in which the approximant consonant (not semivowel) unspecified for rounding appears as an allophone of.

Eugenio Martínez Celdrán describes the voiced velar approximant consonant as follows:

"As for the symbol ⟨ɰ⟩, it is quite evidently inappropriate for representing the Spanish voiced velar approximant consonant. Many authors have pointed out the fact that is not rounded; for example, Pullum & Ladusaw (1986:98) state that 'the sound in question can be described as a semi-vowel (glide) with the properties 'high', 'back', and 'unrounded''. They even establish an interesting parallelism: 'the sound can be regarded as an unrounded '. It is evident, then, that ⟨ɰ⟩ is not an adequate symbol for Spanish. First of all, because it has never been taken into consideration that there is a diphthong in words like paga 'pay', vago 'lazy', lego 'lay', etc., and, secondly, because this sound is rounded when it precedes rounded vowels. Besides, it would be utterly wrong to transcribe the word jugo 'juice' with ⟨ɰ⟩ *, because the pronunciation of that consonant between two rounded vowels is completely rounded whereas is not. [...] The symbol I have always proposed is ⟨ɣ̞⟩, the correlate to the other central approximants in Spanish,  (Martínez Celdrán 1991, 1996:47). This coincides with Ball & Rahilly (1999:90), whose example for the three approximants is the Spanish word abogado 'lawyer'[...]. Ball & Rahilly too criticise in a footnote the confusion between these symbols: 'The difference between an approximant version of the voiced velar fricative, and the velar semi-vowel is that the latter requires spread lips, and must have a slightly more open articulatory channel so that it becomes  if prolonged' (p. 189, fn. 1)."

There is a parallel problem with transcribing the palatal approximant.

The symbol ⟨ɣ̞⟩ may not display properly in all browsers. In that case, ⟨ɣ˕⟩ should be substituted. In broader transcriptions, the lowering diacritic may be omitted altogether, so that the symbol is rendered ⟨ɣ⟩, i.e. as if it represented the corresponding fricative.