Voiced pharyngeal fricative

Not to be confused with the Cyrillic letter Koppa.
For consonants followed by superscript ˤ, see Pharyngealization.
Voiced pharyngeal fricative
ʕ
IPA Number145
Audio sample
Encoding
Entity (decimal)ʕ
Unicode (hex)U+0295
X-SAMPA?\
Braille⠖ (braille pattern dots-235)⠆ (braille pattern dots-23)
Voiced pharyngeal approximant
ʕ̞
Non-syllabic open back unrounded vowel
ɑ̯

The voiced pharyngeal approximant or fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʕ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?\. Epiglottals and epiglotto-pharyngeals are often mistakenly taken to be pharyngeal.

Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, [ʕ] is usually an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language is known to make a phonemic distinction between fricatives and approximants at this place of articulation.

The IPA letter ⟨ʕ⟩ is caseless. Capital ⟨꟎⟩ and lower-case ⟨꟏⟩ are pending at Unicode U+A7CE and U+A7CF.