A voiceless sound made with the body of the tongue raised toward the back of the roof of the mouth, leaving a narrow but open channel. English has no close comparison. Published descriptions vary, placing the constriction as velar, pre-uvular or uvular, and variation between speakers is also reported.
Written by Bodour Imseeh, BSc (Hons), MSc, bilingual Speech and Language Therapist specialising in Arabic–English speech. · Last reviewed 2 November 2026
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This is a broad Arabic guide; realisations vary across dialects and speakers.
There is no close English comparison. English has nothing made in this way — the tongue body raised and drawn back toward the soft palate, with air passing through a narrow but open channel. It is not a /k/, and it is not an /h/.
The channel stays open. That is what the animation is showing — labelled there as a posterior dorsal narrowing — a narrowing, not a closure. The schematic represents a continuant rather than a stop, and the difference between this and ق /q/ — which seals — is that open channel.
The front of the mouth is not involved. The tongue front sits near neutral. Nothing narrows at the front, so nothing a client does with the tip is the target here.
The notation is written /x~χ/ deliberately, and the tilde is doing real work.
Published descriptions of where this sound is made range from velar to uvular, and speakers vary. A single symbol would overstate what is known. The two symbols with a tilde between them record that the reported realisation moves across that range.
The figure marks a channel, not a location. The ring in the animation marks the open narrowing as drawn in that one illustrative configuration. It is not a universal anatomical location and it is not a placement target.
Three sources bear on this in three different ways:
The current inspected evidence does not support a fixed universal خ configuration. A production made further forward or further back than another speaker's is not on that basis an error.
In one Ammani sample (Mashaqba & Hadban, 2024), the most frequent substitutions were ح /ħ/ and ه /h/. The authors give χarūf "sheep" produced as ħalūf or harūf, and taχet "bed" as taħet or tahet.
Word-medially, /ħ/ accounted for all recorded errors in two of the eight age bands.
Deletion was comparatively rare, and خ was never deleted word-initially in that sample.
These are findings from one study of Ammani children. They describe what those children did; they are not a list of expected errors for every Arabic-speaking child.
Scope: broad Arabic This guide shows broad Arabic reference descriptions, not one speaker's or region's pronunciation. Realisations vary across Arabic varieties. Use a client's own dialect and speech community as the comparison when deciding whether a production is expected, variable or needs support.
This sound carries more reported variation in place than most. Published descriptions range from velar to uvular, and one investigator dropped it from a study of Ammani-Jordanian Arabic because she could not determine whether it was velar or uvular (Zawaydeh, 1999).
Reported acquisition ages also differ across varieties. Mashaqba and Hadban (2024) list خ as acquired earlier in Egyptian, Syrian and Kuwaiti samples, and note that their Ammani children acquired the gutturals later than those peers.
Compare a client against speakers of their own variety and speech community, not against this figure.
There is no intervention section on this page, and that is deliberate.
No خ-specific intervention study was identified in the evidence reviewed for this resource, so no protocol, prompt set or therapy approach is presented. That is a statement about what was reviewed, not a finding that no such research exists anywhere.
What follows is about listening and assessing:
Approaches described for other sounds should not be assumed to transfer to خ.
These pages are drawn from Arabic Speech Sounds, a clinical reference covering nine Arabic speech sounds.
All Arabic speech sounds — the index, including the five sounds covered without an animation
What the figure represents
What it does not represent
Soft palate. Drawn raised with the port closed. That is the oral-continuant schematic convention used throughout this resource, not a خ-specific imaging measurement.
Developmental figures. From Mashaqba and Hadban (2024): 40 typically developing monolingual children in Amman, Jordan, five in each of eight age bands from 2;0 to 6;0. On that study's thresholds — percentage of consonants correct, overall for customary and in every position tested for acquisition and mastery — customary production fell in the 2;6–3;0 band, acquisition in 4;6–5;0, and mastery was not reached by 5;6–6;0.
These are not diagnostic cutoffs. A child who has not acquired خ by 5;0 is not thereby disordered. These are not bilingual norms; every child in the study was monolingual, and accuracy was judged by ear, not measured instrumentally.
Where exactly in the mouth is خ made?
There is no single answer, and that is why the notation is written /x~χ/. Published descriptions place the constriction as velar, pre-uvular or uvular, and speakers vary. The figure marks the channel it draws, not a universal location.
Is خ the same as a German or Scottish "ch"?
They are made in a broadly similar region, but this page describes Arabic خ only, and the evidence here does not establish an equivalence with any other language's sound.
My client's خ sounds further forward than mine. Is that an error?
Not on that basis. A realisation produced further forward or further back than another speaker's is not an error simply for differing. Compare against speakers of the client's own variety.
Is it a fricative?
Usually classified as one. One four-speaker Moroccan study reported approximant-like production, and a static side-view figure cannot distinguish the two, so the animation does not encode that distinction.
Are there therapy steps on this page?
No. No خ-specific intervention protocol is presented, because no intervention study for this sound was identified in the evidence reviewed here.
© 2026 Bilingual SLT. Original animation and text. You may use this page with your own clients, and when teaching colleagues within your own organisation. Do not republish it, upload it elsewhere, adapt it into another resource, or present it as your own.
