Guttural - So-called Guttural Languages

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 Ubykh and Arabic.

French, Arabic, Welsh, Armenian, Danish, Hebrew, Scots, and also partly Afrikaans, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Somali, Spanish, and Yiddish all contain sounds that come from the back of the throat, as do 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 (usually) a uvular fricative; Arabic and Hebrew both contain rather more gutturals, including velar, uvular and pharyngeal fricatives.