q — voiceless uvular plosive

How to make the voiceless uvular plosive

Say "caw" and slide the point of contact backwards until it feels like it is in your throat. It should feel heavier and lower-pitched than /k/.

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 q, and each one is a minimal-pair drill waiting to happen.

What this means for learners

In many spoken Arabic dialects ق is realised as a glottal stop or a /ɡ/, so the target depends on which variety you are learning.

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 q attached to the actual words they got wrong, not to an abstract chart.