High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The voiced epiglottal fricative 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 . Although traditionally placed in the fricative row of the IPA chart, [?] is usually an approximant. The IPA symbol itself is ambiguous, but no language has a distinct fricative and approximant at this place of articulation. Sometimes the lowering diacritic is used to specify that the manner is approximant: [??].