emphatic consonant

In PHONOLOGY, a type of CONSONANT, associated particularly with the Semitic languages (and much studied in Arabic), which is articulated in the PHARYNGEAL or UVULAR regions of the vocal tract, or which has a COARTICULATION in those regions (such as pharyngealization and VELARIZATION). Emphasis often spreads to a string of adjacent SEGMENTS, and the phenomenon is thus widely analyzed as a PROSODIC or ‘long’ component of word structure.