Everything about Guttural totally explained
Guttural is a term used to describe any of several
consonantal
speech sounds whose primary
place of articulation is near the back of the oral cavity, and include some
velar consonants,
uvular consonants, and
pharyngeal consonants.
Guttural consonants
The word
guttural is derived from the
French and
Latin denoting a sound coming from the
throat.
The concept of gutturality isn't entirely objective, but a guttural sound is generally considered to be one which is pronounced with the
dorsum of the tongue and/or at any point behind the
hard palate, including the soft palate, the uvula or the pharynx. In scientific discourse, the more precise terms indicating place of articulation, such as
uvular consonant, are generally preferred.
Some phonologists use the term guttural to mean either
radical or
glottal.
Popular attitudes towards guttural consonants
While the modern spoken
English language contains several
velar consonants, guttural consonants pronounced further back in the mouth and throat like the ones found in
Arabic, Somali or
Hebrew are often perceived as very alien. Some English speakers, such as
J.R.R. Tolkien, found those sounds to be very hard on the ear, an attitude not commonly shared by native speakers of Arabic.
Hebrew also traditionally has guttural consonants, but except for the
guttural R, these pronunciations were not found in most European varieties of Hebrew, and in modern
Israel, guttural pronunciations were stigmatized by the
Ashkenazi cultural elite for decades. Today, the most common pronunciation of
Israeli Hebrew has no guttural consonants except for its realizations of /r/ and sometimes the presence of /χ/ and /ħ/, but traditional
Mizrahi Jewish pronunciations (including a full range of guttural consonants not including R) are still used in music and poetry.
A guttural style of singing is very popular within extreme metal (Black, Death, Doom & sometimes Thrash Metal) music, as its aggressive sound arguably complements the music.
So-called guttural languages
In the popular consciousness, some
languages are considered to be
guttural languages, as opposed to just possessing some sounds which are pronounced at the back of the oral cavity. Often, this is just a result of the beliefs of Anglophones or of non-speakers of those languages. Some languages which have fallen under the popular meaning of "guttural", as opposed to the technical meaning, are
German,
Ubykh, and
Arabic.
French,
Arabic,
Welsh language Welsh Armenian,
Hebrew,
Scots, and also partly
German,
Dutch,
Afrikaans,
Portuguese,
Somali,
Yiddish all contain sounds that come from the back of the throat as well as some
Northern English dialects. Sometimes whether a language is considered guttural or not could depend on differences within regions and countries. In French, the only truly guttural sound is a
uvular trill; Arabic and Hebrew both contain rather more gutturals, including
velar,
uvular and
pharyngeal fricatives.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Guttural'.
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