The /g/ Sound

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The /g/ is a sound from the ‘Consonants Pairs’ group and it is called the ‘Voiced velar stop’. This means that you use the back of the tongue to block airflow from the throat.

The /g/ sound is made through the mouth and it is Voiced which means that you vibrate your vocal chords to make the sound.
It is defined by position of your tongue and it is a stop sound, which is a sound made by building up air pressure by stopping air flow and then releasing it. In this case you stop the airflow between the middle of the tongue and the top of the mouth.
To produce the sound push the tongue forward so the middle curls up and touches the top of your mouth and blocks air flow, at the same time create some air pressure by gently trying to breathe out. The sound is made by voicing out and releasing the pressure by dropping the tongue down.

This video is part of our series on phonetics and pronunciation for learners of English as a foreign language.

Phonetics is the science of pronunciation. It can be helpful for people learning English ecause one of the most difficult things about the language is the spelling and pronunciation. English is not very phonetic and as a result the same letters are often pronounced in many different ways in different words.
The IPA helps by providing a way to write words as they are pronounced. The normal alphabet only has 26 characters but there are 44 different sounds that are used to pronounce words. As well as that, most word in English originate from other languages like Greek, Latin and French to name just a few and in many cases the the language of origin influences how the word is pronounced.
The IPA provides a symbol (phoneme) for each sound so the correct pronunciation can be written or printed in dictionaries.