VELAR

For velar sounds, the active articulator is the back of the tongue, and the passive articulator is the velum, or soft palate. The labial-velar approximant and fricative /w/ and /M/are not included here, as they were discussed above with the bilabials; however, it should be remembered that these doubly-articulated sounds strictly belong under both headings. Similarly, although the ‘dark l’ realization,, is also velar, it does not appear in the list below as it is an allophone of /l/.

There is a further accent difference involving velar sounds: in some varieties of English, notably Scottish ones, there is a voiceless velar fricative, /x/: this is the sound at the end of Scots loch, which speakers of other accents typically replace with a [k].