Pharyngeal Sounds in Arabic and Hebrew

The pharynx—the section of the throat between the larynx below and the velum above—is a place of articulation unused by most European languages but exploited richly by the Semitic family. Arabic has two pharyngeal fricatives that function as full phonemes, distinguishing dozens of minimal pairs; Hebrew in its classical pronunciation also used these sounds, though many modern dialects have lost them. Learning to produce pharyngeals is one of the steeper challenges for anyone approaching Arabic from a European language background.

The Two Arabic Pharyngeals

/ħ/ is the voiceless pharyngeal fricative—produced by constricting the throat just above the glottis while air flows through, creating a breathy, guttural fricative absent from any consonant in English, French, or German. Its voiced counterpart /ʕ/ (the letter ʿayn) involves similar pharyngeal constriction with simultaneous vocal cord vibration, producing a squeezed, creaky sound. Native speakers of Arabic describe /ʕ/ as a kind of "pushing" sensation in the throat. Both symbols are visible on our IPA Chart.

Pharyngeals and Word Structure

In Classical Arabic, /ħ/ and /ʕ/ participate fully in the root system—the triliteral consonant skeleton that is the basis of Arabic morphology. The root /ʕ-l-m/ ('knowledge') generates dozens of derived forms: /ʕalama/ ('he knew'), /ʕilm/ ('knowledge'), /muʕallim/ ('teacher'), and more. Replacing /ʕ/ with any other phoneme produces a different or non-existent root. The pharyngeal is thus as lexically and morphologically significant as any of the more familiar consonants.

Pharyngeal sounds also interact with the emphatic consonant series through a process of pharyngealisation spreading across vowels. Vowels adjacent to emphatic consonants /sˤ dˤ tˤ/ take on a back, low quality (/ɑ/ rather than /a/) because of the concurrent pharyngeal gesture. Explore Arabic's full consonant inventory in our language profiles and compare it to Hebrew using the comparison tool.