Voiced epiglottal tap

Not to be confused with Pharyngeal flap surgery.

Voiced epiglottal (or pharyngeal) tap
ʡ̮
ʕ̮
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Encoding
X-SAMPA	>\_X

A voiced epiglottal or pharyngeal tap or flap is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages, though it is not known to exist as a phoneme in any language.

There is no dedicated symbol for this sound in the IPA, but it can be transcribed by adding an "extra short" diacritic to the symbol for the stop, ⟨ʡ̆⟩, or equivalently ⟨ʡ̮⟩ to avoid a clash with the ascender. ^[1] John Esling uses the transcription ⟨ʕ̆⟩. ^[2]

Features

• Its manner of articulation is tap or flap, which means it is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator (usually the tongue) is thrown against another.
• Its place of articulation is epiglottal, which means it is articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis.
• Its phonation is voiced, which means the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation.
• It is an oral consonant, which means that air is not allowed to escape through the nose.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.
• Its airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air only with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Dahalo [3]		[nd̠ódoʡ̮o] ⓘ		'mud'	Intervocalic allophone of the voiceless epiglottal stop /ʡ/, may be an approximant instead. [3]
Ulcha [4]		[θʡ̮eː]		'ear'	Not explicitly described as voiceless or voiced.

According to John Esling, it may also exist in Iraqi Arabic, where the consonant ayin is too short to be an epiglottal stop, but has too much of a burst to be a fricative or approximant. ^[2]

Notes

1. The Unicode® Standard, Version 17.0 – Core Specification (2025), section 7.9.2 Combining Diacritical Marks Extended, and Figure 7-14 Examples of Alternative Code Points for Displaced IPA Diacritics
2. Esling (2010), p. 700.
3. Maddieson et al. (1993), p. 33.
4. Zi, (蜘丏陌) Min Maak. "Epiglottal stop in Nanic languages Phonological value allophony phonotactics and etymology". www.academia.edu. Retrieved 2025-11-08.

References

• Esling, John (2010), "Phonetic Notation", in Hardcastle, William J.; Laver, John; Gibbon, Fiona E. (eds.), The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences (2nd ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN   978-1-4051-4590-9
• Maddieson, Ian; Spajić, Siniša; Sands, Bonny; Ladefoged, Peter (1993), "Phonetic structures of Dahalo", in Maddieson, Ian (ed.), UCLA working papers in phonetics: Fieldwork studies of targeted languages, vol. 84, Los Angeles: The UCLA Phonetics Laboratory Group, pp. 25–65