Epiglottal flap

Epiglottal flap
ʡ̮
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An epiglottal or pharyngeal flap is not known to exist as a phoneme in any language. However, it exists as the intervocalic voiced allophone of the otherwise voiceless epiglottal stop /ʡ/ of Dahalo^[1] and perhaps of other languages. It may also exist in Iraqi Arabic, where the consonant 'ayn is too short to be an epiglottal stop, but has too much of a burst to be a fricative or approximant.^[2]

There is no dedicated symbol for this sound in the IPA, but it can be transcribed by adding an "extra short" diacritic to the symbol for the stop, ⟨ʡ̮⟩. (The diacritic is here placed under rather than above the letter to avoid the ascender.)

Features

Features of the voiceless epiglottal/pharyngeal flap

• Its manner of articulation is flap, which means it is produced with a single contraction of the muscles so that one articulator (usually the tongue) is thrown against another.

• Its place of articulation is epiglottal, which means it is articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis.

• Its phonation is voiced, which means the vocal cords vibrate during the articulation.

• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.

• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the central–lateral dichotomy does not apply.

• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

Occurrence

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Dahalo[1]		[nd̠oːʡ̮o]		'mud'	Intervocallic allophone of the voiceless epiglottal stop /ʡ/, may be an approximant instead.[1]

References

1. Maddieson et al. (1993), p. 33.
2. Esling (2010), p. 700.

Bibliography

• Esling, John (2010), "Phonetic Notation", in Hardcastle, William J.; Laver, John; Gibbon, Fiona E., The Handbook of Phonetic Sciences (2nd ed.), Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-4590-9
• Maddieson, Ian; Spajić, Siniša; Sands, Bonny; Ladefoged, Peter (1993), "Phonetic structures of Dahalo", in Maddieson, Ian, UCLA working papers in phonetics: Fieldwork studies of targeted languages 84, Los Angeles: The UCLA Phonetics Laboratory Group, pp. 25–65