Guttural speech sounds are those with a primary place of articulation near the back of the oral cavity. In some definitions, this is restricted to pharyngeal consonants, but in others includes some velar and uvular consonants. Guttural sounds are typically consonants, but some vowels' articulations may also be considered guttural in nature. Although the term has historically been used by phoneticians, and is occasionally used by phonologists today, its technical use is now limited, and it is more common in popular use as an imprecise term for sounds produced relatively far back in the vocal tract. The term does, however, continue to be used by some phonologists to denote laryngeal consonants, as well as murmured, pharyngealized, glottalized, and strident vowels.
Meaning and etymology
The word guttural literally means 'of the throat', and was first used by phoneticians to describe the Hebrew glottal and , uvular , and pharyngeal . The term is now commonly extended to include also velar consonants, which deviates from the strict etymology. As used in linguistics, such a definition includes all velar consonants, regardless of manner of articulation. The journal Anthropos published a phonetic alphabet to be used in their articles, in which "guttural" included the velar and uvular consonants but not those further back. The term is also commonly used non-technically by English speakers to refer to sounds that subjectively appear harsh or grating. This definition usually includes a number of consonants that are not used in English, such as epiglottal and, uvular and, and velar fricatives and. However, it usually excludes sounds used in English, such as the velar stops and, the velar nasal, and the glottal consonants and.
Guttural languages
In popular consciousness, languages that make extensive use of guttural consonants are often considered to be guttural languages. English-speakers sometimes find such languages strange and even hard on the ear.
Examples of significant usage
Some of the languages that extensively use , , and/or are:
In French, the only truly guttural sound is a uvular fricative. In Portuguese, is becoming dominant in urban areas. There is also a realization as a, and the original pronunciation as an also remains very common in various dialects. In Russian, is assimilated to the palatalization of the following velar consonant: лёгких. It also has a voiced allophone, which occurs before voiced obstruents. In Romanian, becomes the velar in word-final positions and before consonants. In Czech, the phoneme followed by a voiced obstruent can be realized as either or, e.g. abych byl. In Kyrgyz, the consonant phoneme has a uvular realisation in back vowel contexts. In front-vowel environments, is fricativised between continuants to, and in back vowel environments both and fricativise to and respectively. In Uyghur, the phoneme occurs with a back vowel. In the Mongolian language, is usually followed by. The Tuu and Juu 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 is an allophone of in nucleus and coda positions. In onsets, it is pronounced as a uvular approximant. In Danish, may have slight frication, and, according to, it may be a pharyngeal approximant. In Finnish, a weak pharyngeal fricative is the realization of after the vowels or in syllable-coda position, e.g. 'star'.
