Glottal consonant 

Places of
articulation

 • Labial
Bilabial
Labial-velar
Labial-alveolar
Labiodental

 • Bidental

 • Coronal
Linguolabial
Interdental
Dental
Denti-alveolar
Alveolar
Apical
Laminal
Postalveolar
Alveolo-palatal
Retroflex

 • Dorsal
Palatal
Labial-palatal
Velar
Uvular
Uvular-epiglottal

 • Radical
Pharyngeal
Epiglotto-pharyngeal
Epiglottal

 • Glottal

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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:

IPA Description Example
Language Orthography IPA Meaning
Image:Xsampa-questionmark.png voiceless glottal stop Hawaiian okina ʔo.ˈki.na ‘okina
Image:Xsampa-hslash.png breathy voiced glottal "fricative" Czech Praha pra.ɦa Prague
Image:Xsampa-h.png voiceless glottal "fricative" English hat hæt hat

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. [h] is a voiceless transition. [ɦ] is a breathy-voiced transition, and could be transcribed as [h̤].

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 <h> is used for glottal stop.

Because the glottis is necessarily closed for the glottal stop, it cannot be voiced.

See also

References