Guttural sound

Guttural speech sounds are those with a primary place of articulation near the back of the oral cavity, where it is difficult to distinguish a sound's place of articulation and its phonation. In popular usage, it is an imprecise term for sounds produced relatively far back in the vocal tract, such as the German ch or the Arabic heth and ayin, but not simple glottal sounds like h. The term 'guttural language' is used for languages that have such sounds.

As a technical term used by phoneticians and phonologists, guttural has had various definitions. The concept always includes pharyngeal consonants, but may also include velar, uvular, or laryngeal consonants.

Guttural sounds are typically consonants, but murmured, pharyngealized, glottalized and strident vowels may also be considered guttural in nature.

Some phonologists argue that all post-velar sounds constitute a natural class.

Meaning and etymology

The word guttural literally means 'of the throat' (from Latin guttur, meaning throat), and was first used by phoneticians to describe the Hebrew glottal [ʔ] (א) and [h] (ה), uvular [χ] (ח) (for Israeli Hebrew speakers), and pharyngeal [ħ] (ח) and [ʕ] (ע).

English speakers commonly use the term non-technically, especially in America, to refer to sounds that subjectively appear harsh or grating. This definition usually includes several consonants that are not used in American English, such as epiglottals [ʜ] and [ʡ], uvulars (namely fricatives [χ] and [ʁ], stops [q] and [ɢ], and nasal [ɴ]), and velars (only fricatives [x] and [ɣ]). However, it usually excludes sounds used in English, such as the velar stops [k] and [ɡ], the velar nasal [ŋ], and the glottal consonants [h] and [ʔ].

Guttural languages

In popular consciousness, languages that make extensive use of guttural consonants are often considered to be guttural languages. Some English-speakers sometimes find such languages strange and even hard on the ear.

Examples of significant usage

Languages that extensively use the velar and uvular guttural consonants [x, ɣ, q, ɢ, χ, ʁ] include: Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Assyrian, Azerbaijani, Bengali (in the eastern dialects due to the debuccalization, and other varieties of Bengali considered to be their own languages; see Bengali phonology), Crimean Tatar, Dutch, English (some dialects including Scots, Scottish English and Irish/Hiberno-English), French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), Inuktitut, Irish, Kartvelian languages (i.e., Georgian, Mingrelian, Laz, Svan), Kazakh, Kurdish, Kyrgyz, Lakota, Mandarin Chinese, Manx, Mongolian, Noakhali, Pashto, Persian (including Tajik) Punjabi, Russian, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Sindhi, Spanish, Sylheti, Tamil (chiefly in Brahmin Tamil as well as in the non-standard variety of Sri Lankan Tamil due to the debuccalization; see Tamil phonology), Tswana, Turkmen, Uzbek, Uyghur, Vedic Sanskrit (i.e., the jihvāmūlīya (ᳵ ẖ) represented by the visarga), and Welsh.

In addition to their usage of the aforementioned consonants, the following languages also use the pharnygeal gutturals [ħ, ʕ]: Berber languages (i.e. Kabyle, Tamasheq), Cushitic languages (i.e. Somali and Oromo) Anatolian Turkish dialects (as a result of borrowings from Arabic), Northeast Caucasian languages (i.e. Chechen, Lezgian, Avar), Northwest Caucasian (i.e. Abkhaz, Adyghe, Kabardian), Salishan and Wakashan language families in British Columbia, and Semitic languages (i.e. Arabic, Sureth, Tigre, Tigrinya, Turoyo, Hebrew, Ge’ez).

Examples of partial usage

In French, the only truly guttural sound is (usually) a voiced uvular fricative (or the guttural R). In Portuguese, [ʁ] is becoming dominant in urban areas. There is also a realization as a [χ], and the original pronunciation as an [r] also remains very common in various dialects.

In Russian, /x/ is assimilated to the palatalization of the following velar consonant: лёгких [ˈlʲɵxʲkʲɪx]ⓘ. It also has a voiced allophone [ɣ], which occurs before voiced obstruents. In Romanian, /h/ becomes the velar [x] in word-final positions (duh 'spirit') and before consonants (hrean 'horseradish'). In Czech, the phoneme /x/ followed by a voiced obstruent can be realized as either [ɦ] or [ɣ], e.g. abych byl [abɪɣ.bɪl]ⓘ.

In Kyrgyz, the consonant phoneme /k/ has a uvular realisation ([q]) in back vowel contexts. In front-vowel environments, /ɡ/ is fricativised between continuants to [ɣ], and in back vowel environments both /k/ and /ɡ/ fricativise to [χ] and [ʁ] respectively. In Uyghur, the phoneme /ʁ/ occurs with a back vowel. In the Mongolian language, /x/ is usually followed by /ŋ/.

The Tuu and Juu (Khoisan) languages of southern Africa have large numbers of guttural vowels. These sounds share certain phonological behaviors that warrant the use of a term specifically for them. There are scattered reports of pharyngeals elsewhere, such as in the Nilo-Saharan, Tama language.

In Swabian German, a pharyngeal approximant [ʕ] is an allophone of /ʁ/ in nucleus and coda positions. In onsets, it is pronounced as a uvular approximant. In Danish, /ʁ/ may have slight frication, and, according to Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), it may be a pharyngeal approximant [ʕ]. In Finnish, a weak pharyngeal fricative is the realization of /h/ after the vowels /ɑ/ or /æ/ in syllable-coda position, e.g. tähti [tæħti] 'star'.

See also

References

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  49. 1 2 Markus Hiller. "Pharyngeals and "lax" vowel quality" (PDF). Mannheim: Institut für Deutsche Sprache. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-05-28.
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Bibliography