Voiceless uvular fricative

The voiceless uvular fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is X.

Features

Features of the voiceless uvular fricative:

Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
Its place of articulation is uvular which means it is articulated with the back of the tongue (the dorsum) against or near the uvula.
Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.
In other languages

German

German has the voiceless uvular fricative as a phoneme, and it is denoted by "ch", as in ach (the interjection Oh!). The Germans call this sound ach-Laut. This is the sound represented by "ch" when it follows "a", "o", "u", or the diphthong "au" in the most cases. The sound represented by "ch" following "e", "i", "ä", "ö", "ü", the diphthongs "eu" or "äu", or the consonants "l", "n" or "r" is a different consonant, the voiceless palatal fricative.

In some dialects of German, ach-Laut is pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative.