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Strident vowels (also called sphincteric vowels) are strongly pharyngealized 
There is no official symbol for stridency in the IPA, but a superscript (for a voiced epiglottal trill) is often used. In some literature, a subscript double tilde (≈) is sometimes used.
It has been accepted into
vowel
A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s accompanied by an (ary)epiglottal trill, with the larynx
The larynx (), commonly called the voice box, is an organ (anatomy), organ in the top of the neck involved in breathing, producing sound and protecting the trachea against food aspiration. The opening of larynx into pharynx known as the laryngeal ...
being raised and the pharynx
The pharynx (: pharynges) is the part of the throat behind the human mouth, mouth and nasal cavity, and above the esophagus and trachea (the tubes going down to the stomach and the lungs respectively). It is found in vertebrates and invertebrates ...
constricted. Either the epiglottis or the arytenoid cartilages thus vibrate instead of the vocal cords. That is, the epiglottal trill is the voice source for such sounds.
Strident vowels are fairly common in Khoisan languages
The Khoisan languages ( ; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a number of Languages of Africa, African languages once classified together, originally by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan is defined as those languages that have click languages, click consonant ...
, which contrasts them with simple pharyngealized vowels. Stridency is used in onomatopoeia in Zulu and Lamba. Stridency may be a type of phonation
The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defi ...
called harsh voice. A similar phonation, without the trill, is called ''ventricular voice''; both have been called ''pressed voice''. Bai, of southern China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
, has a register system that has allophonic strident and pressed vowels.
There is no official symbol for stridency in the IPA, but a superscript (for a voiced epiglottal trill) is often used. In some literature, a subscript double tilde (≈) is sometimes used.
It has been accepted into Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
, at code points U+1DFD and U+107B4.
Languages
These languages use phonemic strident vowels: * Tuu languages ** Taa (See Taa vowels) ** ǃKwi (ǃUi) *** Nǁng (a dialect cluster; moribund) *** ǀXam (a dialect cluster, including Nǀuusaa) †See also
*Nasal vowel
A nasal vowel is a vowel that is produced with a lowering of the soft palate (or velum) so that the air flow escapes through the nose and the mouth simultaneously, as in the French vowel /ɑ̃/ () or Amoy []. By contrast, oral vowels are p ...
* Vowel
References
Sources
* Phonation {{phonetics-stub br:Vogalenn skiltr