Voiceless velar fricative

The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. Its manner of articulation is a glottalic fricative. Its place of articulation is velar. The symbol used by the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent this symbol is [x]. The [x] sound is rare in, but not completely absent from English. Where it occurs, it is nearly always represented by a "ch." Many speakers, especially in the United States, do not (often cannot) make this sound, and are sometimes not even aware of its existence; these speakers replace it with [h] in words such as "chutzpah" or "challah," or [k] in words such as "loch" or "leprechaun." These alternative pronunciations are considered acceptable by most authorities.

The [x] sound is a somewhat common sound cross-linguistically and very common in Assamese.

Varieties of [x]

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia article. Browse Wikipedia for more information.