The
glottal stop, or more fully, the
voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of
consonantal sound used in many
spoken languages. In English the feature is represented for example by the hyphen in
uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or
ʻokina in
Hawaii among those attempting an authentic pronunciation of that name.
The symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . It is called the
glottal stop because the technical term for the gap between the vocal folds, which is closed up in the production of this sound, is the
glottis.
Phonetic and phonological features
Features of the glottal stop:
- Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibration of the vocal cords; necessarily so, because the vocal cords are held tightly together, preventing vibration.
- It is an oral consonant, which means the air released when the closure is relaxed is allowed to escape through the mouth rather than the nasal cavity.
- Because it is pronounced in the larynx, situated in the windpipe; i.e. it has no component involved in the description of movements of the organs of the mouth, for example the tongue, so the central/lateral dichotomy does not apply, and nor do the tongue-front features such as coronal and distributed.
Phonology and symbolization of the glottal stop in selected languages
While this
segment is not a written
in English, it is present phonetically in nearly all dialects of English as an
allophone of in the syllable coda. Speakers of
Cockney and several other British dialects also pronounce an intervocalic between vowels as in
city. Standard English inserts a glottal stop before a tautosyllabic voiceless plosive, e.g. sto’p, tha’t, kno’ck, wa’tch, also lea’p, soa’k, hel’p, pin’ch .
In many languages that don't allow a sequence of vowels, such as
Persian, the glottal stop may be used to break up such a hiatus. There are intricate interactions between falling
tone and the glottal stop in the histories of such languages as
Danish (cf.
stød),
Chinese and
Thai.
In the traditional
Romanization of many languages, such as Arabic, the glottal stop is transcribed with an apostrophe, , and this is the source of the IPA character . In many Polynesian languages that use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written with a reversed apostrophe, (called
‘okina in
Hawaiian), which, confusingly, is also used to transcribe the Arabic
ayin and is the source of the IPA character for the
voiced pharyngeal fricative . In
Malay, it is represented by the letter ‹k›, and in
Võro and
Maltese by ‹q›. Other scripts have whole letters used for representing the glottal stop, such as the
Hebrew letter
aleph.
Glottalization is found in five out of the ten surviving branches of Indo-European, viz. Indic, Iranian, Armenian, Baltic, and Germanic and is theorized to be ancient.
In the graphic representation of most Philippine languages, the glottal stop has no consistent symbolization. In most cases, however, a word that begins with a vowel-letter (e.g. Tagalog aso 'dog') is always pronounced with an unrepresented glottal stop before that vowel (as also in Modern German and Hausa). Some orthographies employ a hyphen, instead of the reverse apostrophe, if the glottal stop occurs in the middle of the word (e.g. Tagalog pag-ibig 'love'). When it occurs in the end of a Tagalog word, the last vowel is written with a circumflex accent (if the accent is on the last syllable) or a grave accent (if the accent occurs at the penultimate syllable).Occurrence
See also
