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, the Greek chi. The sound is represented by in Americanist phonetic notation. It is sometimes transcribed with in broad transcription. There is also a voiceless uvular fricative trill in some languages, e.g. Hebrew and Wolof as well as in the northern and central varieties of European Spanish. It can be transcribed as in IPA. It is found as either the voiceless counterpart of or the sole dorsal fricative in Northern StandardDutch and regional dialects and languages of the Netherlandsspoken above the rivers Rhine, Meuse and Waal. A plain fricative that is articulated further front, as either velar or post-palatal is typical of dialects spoken south of the rivers, including Belgian Standard Dutch. In those dialects, the voiceless uvular fricative trill is one of the possible realizations of the phoneme. In fact, more languages claimed to have a voiceless uvular fricative may actually have a fricative trill. note that there is "a complication in the case of uvular fricatives in that the shape of the vocal tract may be such that the uvula vibrates." The frication in the fricative trill variant sometimes occurs at the middle or the back of the soft palate, rather than the uvula itself. This is the case in Northern Standard Dutch as well as some varieties of Arabic, Limburgish and Madrid Spanish. It may thus be appropriate to call those variants voiceless velar-uvular fricative trill as the trill component is always uvular. The corresponding IPA symbol is . Thus, in cases where a dialectal variation between voiceless uvular and velar fricatives is claimed the main difference between the two may be the trilling of the uvula as frication can be velar in both cases - compare Northern Dutchacht 'eight' with Southern Dutch or, which features a non-trilled fricative articulated at the middle or front of the soft palate. For a voiceless pre-uvular fricative, see voiceless velar fricative.
