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Uvulars are articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the Palatine uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than . Uvulars may be stop consonant, fricatives, nasal consonant, trill consonant, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and the symbol for the voiced fricative is used instead. Uvular affricates can certainly be made but are rare: they occur in most Turkic languages, most Persian languages, most Arabic languages, in some southern High-German dialects, as well as a few African and Native American languages. (Ejective uvular affricates occur as realizations of uvular stops in Kazakh language, Bashkir language, Arabic languages, Lillooet, or as allophonic realizations of the ejective uvular fricative in Georgian.) Uvular consonants are typically incompatible with advanced tongue root, and they often cause retracted vowel of neighboring vowels.
The voiceless uvular stop is transcribed as in both the IPA and X-SAMPA. It is pronounced somewhat like the voiceless velar stop , but with the middle of the tongue further back on the velum, against or near the uvula. The most familiar use will doubtless be in the transliteration of Arabic place names such as Qatar and Iraq into English, though, since English lacks this sound, this is generally pronounced as , the most similar sound that occurs in English.
, the uvular ejective, is found in Ubykh language, Tlingit language, Cusco Quechua, and some others. In Georgian, the existence of this phoneme is debatable, since the general realization of the letter "ყ" is . This is due to merging with and therefore being influenced by this merger and becoming .
, the voiced equivalent of , is much rarer. It is like the voiced velar stop , but articulated in the same uvular position as . Few languages use this sound, but it is found in Iranian Persian (and allophonicly in other varieties of Persian) and in some Northeast Caucasian languages, notably Tabasaran, and Pacific Northwest, such as Kwakʼwala. It may also occur as an allophone of another uvular consonant. In Kazakh language, the voiced uvular stop is an allophone of the voiced uvular fricative after the velar nasal.
The voiceless uvular fricative is similar to the voiceless velar fricative , except that it is articulated near the uvula. It is found in Georgian, and instead of in some dialects of German, Spanish, and colloquial Arabic, as well as in some Dutch varieties and in standard Afrikaans.
Uvular flaps have been reported for Kube language (Trans–New Guinea), Hamtai language (Angan languages family), and for the variety of Khmer language spoken in Battambang province.
The Enqi dialect of the Bai language has an unusually complete series of uvular consonants consisting of the stops /q/, /qʰ/ and /ɢ/, the fricatives /χ/ and /ʁ/, and the nasal /ɴ/. All of these contrast with a corresponding velar consonant of the same manner of articulation. The existence of the uvular nasal is especially unusual, even more so than the existence of the voiced stop.
The Tlingit language of the Southeast Alaska has ten uvular consonants, all of which are voiceless obstruents, while the extinct Ubykh language of Turkey has Ubykh phonology. The Tlingit uvular consonants are:
| +Uvulars in Tlingit |
Two variants can then be established. Since palatalized consonants are -back, the appearance of palatalized uvulars in a few languages such as Ubykh language is difficult to account for. According to Vaux (1999), they possibly hold the features +high, -back, -ATR, the last being the distinguishing feature from a palatalized velar consonant.
As with most trills, uvular trills are often reduced to a single contact, especially between vowels.
Unlike other uvular consonants, the uvular trill is articulated without a retraction of the tongue, and therefore doesn't lower neighboring high vowels the way uvular stops commonly do.
Several other languages, including Inuktitut, Abkhaz language, Uyghur language and some varieties of Arabic, have a voiced uvular fricative but do not treat it as a rhotic consonant. However, Modern Hebrew and some modern varieties of Arabic also both have at least one uvular fricative that is considered non-rhotic, and one that is considered rhotic.
In Lakota language the uvular trill is an allophone of the voiced uvular fricative before .
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