Uvular consonant

Uvular affricates can certainly be made but are rare: they occur in some southern High-German dialects, as well as in a few African and Native American languages.

Uvular consonants are typically incompatible with advanced tongue root,[1] and they often cause retraction of neighboring vowels.

In parts of the Caucasus mountains and northwestern North America, nearly every language has uvular stops and fricatives.

It is found in Georgian, and instead of [x] in some dialects of German, Spanish, and colloquial Arabic, as well as in some Dutch varieties and in standard Afrikaans.

Uvular flaps have been reported for Kube (Trans–New Guinea), Hamtai (Angan family), and for the variety of Khmer spoken in Battambang province.

The Enqi dialect of the Bai language has an unusually complete series of uvular consonants consisting of the stops /q/, /qʰ/ and /ɢ/, the fricatives /χ/ and /ʁ/, and the nasal /ɴ/.

The uvular trill [ʀ] is used in certain dialects (especially those associated with European capitals) of French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, as well as sometimes in Modern Hebrew, for the rhotic phoneme.

Several other languages, including Inuktitut, Abkhaz, Uyghur and some varieties of Arabic, have a voiced uvular fricative but do not treat it as a rhotic consonant.