Voiceless upper-pharyngeal plosive

Voiceless upper-pharyngeal plosive
ꞯ
q˗
ʡ̟
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ꞯ
Unicode (hex)	U+A7AF
Image

The voiceless upper-pharyngeal plosive or stop is a rare consonant.

Pharyngeal consonants are typically pronounced at two regions of the pharynx, upper and lower. The lower region is epiglottal, so the upper region is often abbreviated as merely 'pharyngeal'. Among widespread speech sounds in the world's languages, the upper pharynx produces a voiceless fricative [ħ] and a voiced sound that ranges from fricative to (more commonly) approximant, [ʕ]. The epiglottal region produces the plosive [ʡ] as well as sounds that range from fricative to trill, [ʜ] and [ʢ]. Because the latter pair is most often trilled and rarely simply fricative, these consonants have been classified together as simply pharyngeal, and distinguished as plosive, fricative/approximant and trill.^[1]