Glottal consonant

Glottal consonants are consonants using the glottis as their primary articulation. 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 do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, glottal consonants behave as typical consonants in many languages. For example, in Literary Arabic, most words are formed from a root C-C-C consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as or . The glottal consonants and can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like "normal" consonants such as or .

The glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet are as follows:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	glottal stop	Hawaiian			Hawaii
	voiceless glottal affricate	Yuxi dialect			'can, may'
	voiceless glottal fricative	English	hat		hat
	voiced glottal fricative	Czech			Prague
	creaky-voiced glottal approximant	Gimi	hagok		'many'

Characteristics

In many languages, the "fricatives" are not true fricatives. 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 as approximants. is a voiceless transition. is a breathy-voiced transition, and could be transcribed as . Lamé is one of very few languages that contrasts voiceless and voiced glottal fricatives.

The glottal stop occurs in many languages. Often all vocalic onsets are preceded by a glottal stop, for example in German (in careful pronunciation; often omitted in practice). The Hawaiian language writes the glottal stop as the ‘okina ‘, which resembles a single open quotation mark. Some alphabets use diacritics for the glottal stop, such as hamza Template:Angle bracket in the Arabic alphabet; in many languages of Mesoamerica, the Latin letter Template:Angle bracket is used for glottal stop, in Maltese, the letter Template:Angle bracket is used, and in many indigenous languages of the Caucasus, the letter commonly referred to as heng Template:Angle bracket is used.

Because the glottis is necessarily closed for the glottal stop, it cannot be voiced. So-called voiced glottal stops are not full stops, but rather creaky voiced glottal approximants (here transcribed with the IPA wildcard ). They occur as the intervocalic allophone of glottal stop in many languages. Gimi contrasts and , corresponding to and in related languages.

See also

• Glottalic consonant
• Glottalization
• Place of articulation
• Index of phonetics articles
• Guttural