Velar consonant

Velar consonants are sounds made when the back part of the tongue touches the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth. These sounds are used in many languages.

The soft palate is a large area, and the tongue's movements there are not very exact. This means velar consonants can change shape easily. They might move forward or backward depending on the vowels next to them. For example, they can sound more forward, like the English "k" in "keen."

Some languages have special kinds of velar consonants. These include palatalised velars, where the sound is made with a slight front tongue movement, and labialized velars, where the lips are rounded at the same time. There are also labial-velar consonants, made with the tongue at the soft palate and the lips together. An example is the sound in some African languages represented as [k͡p].

Examples

Some velar consonants are listed by the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Lack of velars

Some languages do not use certain sounds made at the back of the mouth. For example, Xavante and standard Tahitian do not have sounds made with the soft palate part of the mouth. In Pirahã, men do not make one of these sounds at all.

In some places, sounds that used to be made at the back of the mouth have changed. In parts of the Pacific Northwest, old sounds have shifted to newer ones. Some languages keep special sounds made with rounded lips along with the back-of-the-mouth sounds, while others have different sounds instead.

Even common sounds like the "k" in "key" are not used in every language. For example, Mandarin Chinese does not use the "g" sound very often. In Hawaiian, the "k" sound can change depending on where it appears in a word. Some Khoisan languages also use these back-of-the-mouth sounds less often.

Velodorsal consonants

Normal velar consonants are made when the top of the tongue touches the soft palate at the back of the mouth. In some speech disorders, there are special sounds where the soft palate moves down to touch the tongue instead, and the tongue stays still. These special sounds are written with unique symbols, like ⟨𝼃⟩ for a quiet sound, ⟨𝼁⟩ for a voiced sound, and ⟨𝼇⟩ for a nasal sound.

This special way of writing doesn’t work for some fricative sounds like x and ɣ, but we can use a small mark below the symbols to show these sounds, like ⟨𝼃̞⟩ or ⟨𝼁̞⟩.