Voiced pharyngeal fricative
A voiced pharyngeal fricative or approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is.
Although the official classification of manner for this sound in the IPA is a fricative, spectrographic and acoustic studies have found that it is most often realized as an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, as no language is known to make a phonemic distinction between voiced pharyngeal fricatives and approximants. For clarity, the approximant may be distinguished with the IPA diacritic for lowering, such as. Additionally, laryngoscopic studies by John Esling have shown the vowel to have distinct pharyngeal constriction and resonance in its articulation, making the analogous semivowel of. Esling furthers this notion in his expanded notation of the IPA chart; alongside merging pharyngeal and epiglottal consonants into a single column, he suggests that if it were spatially possible to align the vowel chart with the consonant chart, so that the relations between vowels and their semivowel counterparts are maintained, then the vowels and should be placed under the combined pharyngeal/epiglottal column.
The IPA letter is caseless. Capital and lower-case were added to Unicode in September, 2025 with version 17.0.