The voiced uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages.

The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʁ⟩, an inverted small uppercase letter ⟨ʀ⟩, or in broad transcription ⟨r⟩ if rhotic.

Features of the voiced uvular fricative: In Western Europe, a uvular trill pronunciation of rhotic consonants spread from northern French to several dialects and registers of Basque,[2] Catalan, Danish, Dutch, German, Judaeo-Spanish, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Swedish, some variants of Low Saxon,[3] and Yiddish.

Because such uvular rhotics often do not contrast with alveolar ones, IPA transcriptions may often use ⟨r⟩ to represent them for ease of typesetting.

For more information, see guttural R. Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996) note, "There is... a complication in the case of uvular fricatives in that the shape of the vocal tract may be such that the uvula vibrates.