Glottal consonant
Glottal consonants are
consonants articulated with the
glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricatives, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, the glottal stop at least behaves as a typical consonant in languages such as
Tsou.
Glottal consonants in the
International Phonetic Alphabet:
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. is a voiceless transition. is a
breathy-voiced transition, and could be transcribed as .
The
glottal stop occurs in many languages. Often all vocalic onsets are preceded by a glottal stop, for example in
German. The
Hawaiian language writes the glottal stop as an opening single quote
‘. Some alphabets use
diacritics for the glottal stop, such as hamza <
ء> in the
Arabic alphabet; in many languages of
Mesoamerica, the Latin letter
is used for glottal stop.
Because the glottis is necessarily closed for the glottal stop, it cannot be voiced.* Glottalic consonant
* Place of articulation
* List of phonetics topics
