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:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	voiceless glottal stop	Hawai‘ian	‘okina	[ʔo.ˈki.na]	‘okina
	breathy voiced glottal "fricative"	Czech	Praha	[pra.ɦa]	Prague
	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 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

• Glottalic consonant
• Place of articulation
• List of phonetics topics