Voiced velar approximant
The voiced velar approximant is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is codice_1. The consonant is not present in English, but approximates to the sound of a 'g' with the throat kept open, or like making a 'w' sound without the lips touching. The voiced velar approximant can in many cases be considered the semivocalic counterpart of the close back unrounded vowel . and with the non-syllabic diacritic are used in different transcription systems to  represent the same sound. In some languages, such as Spanish, the voiced velar approximant appears as an allophone of – see below. The symbol for the velar approximant originates from , but with a vertical line. Compare and for the labio-palatal approximant. Features. Features of the voiced velar approximant: Relation with and. Some languages have a voiced velar approximant that is unspecified for rounding, and therefore cannot be considered the semivocalic equivalent of either or its rounded counterpart . Examples of such languages are Catalan, Galician and Spanish, in which the approximant "consonant" (not "semivowel") unspecified for rounding appears as an  allophone of . Eugenio Martínez Celdrán describes the voiced velar approximant consonant as follows: There is a parallel problem with transcribing the palatal approximant. The symbol may not display properly in all browsers. In that case, should be substituted. In broader transcriptions, the lowering diacritic may be omitted altogether, so that the symbol is rendered , i.e. as if it represented the corresponding fricative.