IPA reference · consonant
ʕ — voiced pharyngeal fricative
The voiced counterpart of /ħ/ — a constricted, voiced sound made in the throat.
Also called: ayin
How to make the voiced pharyngeal fricative
Constrict the pharynx as for /ħ/ and voice through it. Many learners find it by starting from the strain of lifting something heavy while saying "ah".
This sound does not occur in standard English. That means there is no word you can say to find it by accident; you have to build it from the articulatory instruction above and check it against a recording.
Languages that use it
Sounds it gets confused with
Most pronunciation errors are not random — they are a substitution of the nearest sound the speaker already owns. These are the usual substitutions for ʕ, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.
Standard Israeli Hebrew has merged ע into /ʔ/, and learners of Arabic default to the same substitution.
What this means for learners
Skipping ع entirely is the most common learner behaviour and it makes words unrecognisable, since it is a full consonant carrying lexical weight.
Teaching this sound
Describing a sound in words gets a student roughly half the way there. The other half is hearing it produced correctly, immediately after producing it incorrectly, with both versions available to replay. That is the argument for recording during the lesson rather than after it: the student leaves with your model of ʕ attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.
Frequently asked questions
What sound does the IPA symbol ʕ make?
ʕ is the voiced pharyngeal fricative. The voiced counterpart of /ħ/ — a constricted, voiced sound made in the throat. It does not occur in standard English.
How do you pronounce ʕ?
Constrict the pharynx as for /ħ/ and voice through it. Many learners find it by starting from the strain of lifting something heavy while saying "ah".
Which languages have the voiced pharyngeal fricative?
Among the languages covered here: Arabic (عربي, “Arabic”); Hebrew (עברית, “Hebrew (Mizrahi)”).
What is the difference between ʕ and ʔ?
Standard Israeli Hebrew has merged ע into /ʔ/, and learners of Arabic default to the same substitution.