Voiced velar plosive

The voiced velar plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages.

Features of the voiced velar stop: Of the six stops that would be expected from the most common pattern worldwide—that is, three places of articulation plus voicing ([p b, t d, k ɡ])—[p] and [ɡ] are the most frequently missing, being absent in about 10% of languages that otherwise have this pattern.

Missing [ɡ], (when the language uses voicing to contrast stops) on the other hand, is widely scattered around the world, for example /ɡ/ is not a native phoneme of Belarusian, Dutch, Czech, or Slovak and occurs only in borrowed words in those languages.

With uvulars, where there is even less space between the glottis and tongue for airflow, the imbalance is more extreme: Voiced [ɢ] is much rarer than voiceless [q].

[3] In many Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindustani, plain [g] and aspirated [gh] are in contrastive distribution.