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Glottal consonants areconsonants using theglottis as their primaryarticulation. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the glottal fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have, while some[who?] do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, glottal consonants behave as typical consonants in many languages. For example, inLiterary Arabic, most words are formed from a rootC-C-C consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as/CaːCiC/ or/maCCuːC/. The glottal consonants/h/ and/ʔ/ can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like "normal" consonants such as/k/ or/n/.
The glottal consonants in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet are as follows:
| IPA | Description | Example | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language | Orthography | IPA | Meaning | ||
| ʔ | glottal stop | Hawaiian | Hawaiʻi | [həˈvɐjʔi,həˈwɐjʔi] | Hawaii |
| ʔ͜h | voiceless glottal affricate | Yuxi dialect | 可 | [ʔ͜ho˥˧] | 'can, may' |
| h | voiceless glottal fricative | English | hat | [ˈhæt] | hat |
| ɦ | voiced glottal fricative | Czech | Praha | [ˈpra.ɦa] | Prague |
| ʔ̞ | creaky-voiced glottal approximant | Gimi | hagok | [haʔ̞oʔ] | 'many' |
In many languages, the "fricatives" are not truefricatives. This is a historical usage of the word. They instead represent transitional states of the glottis (phonation) without a specific place of articulation, and may behave asapproximants.[h] is a voiceless transition.[ɦ] is abreathy-voiced transition, and could be transcribed as[h̤].Lamé is one of very few languages thatcontrasts voiceless and voiced glottal fricatives.[1]
Theglottal stop occurs in many languages. Often all vocalic onsets are preceded by a glottal stop, for example inGerman (in careful pronunciation; often omitted in practice). TheHawaiian language writes the glottal stop as the‘okina‘, which resembles a single open quotation mark. Some alphabets usediacritics for the glottal stop, such ashamza⟨ء⟩ in theArabic alphabet; in many languages ofMesoamerica, the Latin letter⟨h⟩ is used for glottal stop, inMaltese, the letter⟨q⟩ is used, and in manyindigenous languages of the Caucasus, the letter commonly referred to asheng⟨Ꜧ ꜧ⟩ is used.[citation needed]
Because the glottis is necessarily closed for the glottal stop, it cannot be voiced. So-called voiced glottal stops are not full stops, but rathercreaky voiced glottal approximants that may be transcribed[ʔ̞]. They occur as the intervocalic allophone of glottal stop in many languages.Gimi contrasts/ʔ/ and/ʔ̞/, corresponding to/k/ and/ɡ/ in related languages.
