The voiced velar approximant 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 M\. The consonant is not present in English, but approximates to the sound of a 'g' with the throat kept open. The voiced velar approximant can in many cases be considered the semivocalic counterpart of the close back unrounded vowel. The two are almost identical featurally. and with the non-syllabic diacritic are used in different transcription systems to represent the same sound. In some languages, such as Spanish, the voiced velar approximant appears as an allophone of – see [|below]. Some languages have the voiced pre-velar approximant, which is articulated slightly more front compared with the place of articulation of the prototypical voiced velar approximant, though not as front as the prototypical palatal approximant. The symbol for the velar approximant originates from, but with a vertical line. Compare and for the labio-palatal approximant.
Features
Features of the voiced velar approximant: The most common type of this approximant is glide or semivowel. The term glide emphasizes the characteristic of movement of from the vowel position to a following vowel position. The term semivowel emphasizes that, although the sound is vocalic in nature, it is not 'syllabic'. For a description of the approximant consonant variant used e.g. in Spanish, see below.
Some languages have a voiced velar approximant that is unspecified for rounding, and therefore cannot be considered the semivocalic equivalent of either or its rounded counterpart. Examples of such languages are Catalan, Galician and Spanish, in which the unspecified for rounding voiced velar approximant consonant appears as an allophone of. Eugenio Martínez Celdrán describes the voiced velar approximant consonant as follows: There is a parallel problem with transcribing the palatal approximant. The symbol may also be used when the voiced velar approximant is merely an allophone of the voiced velar fricative as, compared with, it is more similar to the symbol. The X-SAMPA equivalent of is G_o. The symbol may not display properly in all browsers. In that case, should be substituted. In broader transcriptions, the lowering diacritic may be omitted altogether, so that the symbol is rendered, i.e. as if it represented the corresponding fricative.
