The voiced velar lateral fricative is a very rare

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

al sound that can be found in Archi, a Northeast Caucasian language of

Dagestan Dagestan ( ; ; ), officially the Republic of Dagestan, is a republic of Russia situated in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe, along the Caspian Sea. It is located north of the Greater Caucasus, and is a part of the North Caucasian Fede ...

, in which it is clearly a

fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...

, although further forward than velars in most languages, and might better be called ''prevelar''. (The source uses the symbol for the

voiced alveolar lateral fricative The voiced alveolar lateral fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents voiced dental, alveolar, and postalveolar lateral fricatives is (sometime ...

, , but also notes that the sound to be prevelar.) It occurs as an intervocalic allophone of in Nii and perhaps some related Wahgi languages of New Guinea. The symbol in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standard written representation ...

that traditionally represents this sound is , though in

extIPA The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internati ...

is preferred. The two symbols are equivalent.

Features

Features of the voiced velar lateral fricative:

Occurrence

References

Lateral consonants Pulmonic consonants Voiced oral consonants Velar consonants {{phonetics-stub