Acreaky-voiced glottal approximant is aconsonant sound in somelanguages. It involves tension in theglottis and diminution of airflow, compared to surroundingvowels, but not fullocclusion.It is a common phonetic realization of aglottal stop, especially intervocalically, but is only rarely contrastive except when gemination is involved.

There is no symbol in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet dedicated for this sound, but theextIPA pre-/post-creak diacritic ⟨˷⟩ can be used. One source has used the transcription ⟨ʔ̬⟩,^[1] and another has used ⟨ʔ̰⟩;^[2] however, neither are physically possible,^[a] and the sources quoteLadefoged & Maddieson (1996), who use theIPA wildcard ⟨*⟩ in their transcription.

Features of a creaky-voiced glottal approximant:

• Itsmanner of articulation isapproximant, which means it is produced by narrowing the vocal tract at the place of articulation, but not enough to produce aturbulent airstream.
• Its phonation iscreaky-voiced.
• It is anoral consonant, which means that air is not allowed to escape through the nose.
• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, themedian–lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• Itsairstream mechanism ispulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air only with theintercostal muscles andabdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

It is an intervocalic allophone of aglottal stop in many languages; in languages with gemination, it may only be a stop intervocalically when geminate.^[4]

• Garellek, Marc; Chai, Yuan; Huang, Yaqian; Van Doren, Maxine (2023)."Voicing of glottal consonants and non-modal vowels".Journal of the International Phonetic Association.53 (2):305–332.doi:10.1017/S0025100321000116.
• Kehrein, Wolfgang; Golston, Chris (2005). "A prosodic theory of laryngeal contrasts".Phonology.21 (3):325–357.doi:10.1017/S0952675704000302.JSTOR 4615515.S2CID 62734231.
• Ladefoged, Peter;Maddieson, Ian (1996).The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.ISBN 0-631-19815-6.
• Laver, John (1994).Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/CBO9781139166621.ISBN 0-521-45655-X.

• Approximant consonants
• Glottal consonants
• Pulmonic consonants
• Voiced oral consonants

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• Short description is different from Wikidata
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