Voiced velar plosive

The voiced velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages.

Some languages have the voiced pre-velar plosive, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as front as the prototypical palatal plosive.

Conversely, some languages have the voiced post-velar plosive, which is articulated slightly behind the place of articulation of the prototypical velar plosive, though not as back as the prototypical uvular plosive.

IPA symbol
The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɡ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is. Strictly, the IPA symbol is the so-called single-storey G, but the double-storey G is considered an acceptable alternative. The Unicode character renders as either a single-storey G or a double-storey G depending on font; the character  is always a single-storey G, but it is generally available only in fonts with the IPA Extensions Unicode character block.

Features


Features of the voiced velar stop:

Occurrence
Of the six stops that would be expected from the most common pattern worldwide—that is, three places of articulation plus voicing — and are the most frequently missing, being absent in about 10% of languages that otherwise have this pattern. Absent stop is an areal feature (see also Voiceless bilabial stop). Missing, (when the language uses voicing to contrast stops) on the other hand, is widely scattered around the world, for example /ɡ/ is not a native phoneme of Belarusian, Dutch, Czech, or Slovak and occurs only in borrowed words in those languages. A few languages, such as Modern Standard Arabic and part of the Levantine dialects (e.g. Lebanese and Syrian), are missing both, although most Modern Arabic dialects have in their native phonemic systems as a reflex of $⟨ق⟩$ or less commonly of $⟨ج⟩$.

It seems that is somewhat more difficult to articulate than the other basic stops. Ian Maddieson speculates that this may be due to a physical difficulty in voicing velars: Voicing requires that air flow into the mouth cavity, and the relatively small space allowed by the position of velar consonants means that it will fill up with air quickly, making voicing difficult to maintain in for as long as it is in  or. This could have two effects: and  might become confused, and the distinction is lost, or perhaps a  never develops when a language first starts making voicing distinctions. With uvulars, where there is even less space between the glottis and tongue for airflow, the imbalance is more extreme: Voiced is much rarer than voiceless.

In many Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindustani, plain [g] and aspirated [gh] are in contrastive distribution.