Voiceless glottal fricative

IPA number	146
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X-SAMPA	h
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The voiceless glottal transition, commonly called a "fricative", is a type of sound used in some spoken languages which often behaves like a consonant, but sometimes behaves more like a vowel, or is indeterminate in its behavior. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is h, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is h.

Features

Features of the "voiceless glottal fricative":

• Its phonation type is voiceless, which means that the air passes through the vocal cords without causing them to vibrate.
• It is a transitional state of the glottis. It has no manner of articulation other than its phonation type. Because there is no other constriction to produce friction in the vocal tract, most phoneticians no longer consider [h] to be a fricative. However, the term "fricative" is generally retained for historical reasons.
• It has no fricative place of articulation. The term glottal only refers to the nature of its phonation, and does not describe the location of the stricture nor the turbulence. All consonants except for the glottals, and all vowels, have an individual place of articulation in addition to the state of the glottis. As with all other consonants, surrounding vowels influence the pronunciation [h], and [h] has sometimes been presented as a voiceless vowel, having the place of articulation of these surrounding vowels.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• Because it is pronounced in the throat, without a component in the mouth, the central/lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

In English

Most dialects of English have [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "h", as in happy. It usually occurs at the beginning of a morpheme. Between vowels, as in ahead, it may be voiced (murmured) rather than voiceless. In some regional dialects of British English, such as Cockney, there is no [h].

In other languages

Non-native speakers of English, whose native languages either lack an /h/ or use the letter "h" for different sounds, may substitute /x/ for /h/ or not pronounce it at all when speaking English.

Arabic

In Arabic, the [h] phoneme is represented by the letter هـ.

Basque

Some dialects of Basque have [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "h". In other dialects, [h] has been dropped, and in some spelling systems for these dialects, the "h" is no longer written. This particular dialectical variation was one of the largest difficulties in unifying the dialects of Basque.

Finnish

The Finnish phoneme /h/ is realized according to the surrounding vowels; next to /e/, /ö/, /ä/ and /o/ or initially, it is the voiceless [h]. Particular to Finnish is that /h/ often appears as a syllable coda, e.g. pehmeä. Sometimes, although [h] is found, the phonation type is breathy voiced until the vocal folds are opened to the maximum, after which it becomes voiceless, e.g. pihti. Even so, this is a voiceless phoneme gaining breathy voicing due the environment, not a breathy-voiced phoneme.

Similarly, some stricture in the vocal tract may be necessary to produce enough turbulence to differentiate a /h/ from its absence, so very weak fricatives near-identical to their surrounding vowels are produced. A slight pharyngeal stricture — nowhere near a real pharyngeal fricative — is used to produce /h/ in paha due to /a/. A palatal fricative is found in vihne due to /i/. Labial frication, where the lips in an identical position to their surrounding vowels, is found in puhu due to the rounded vowel /u/. In pre-modern orthography, the stronger frication was denoted with 'ch' in analogy to German, but modern orthography uses only an 'h', e.g. old huchta vs. modern huhta.

German

German has [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "h", as in Hand (hand).

Irish

In Irish, word-initial /h/ is spelled h in loanwords from English, such as hata "hat". Otherwise, word-initial /h/ represents the lenition of /s/ or /t/, in which case it is spelled sh or th respectively. In the middles and ends of words, it is always spelled th.

Kazakh

Kazakh has the phoneme [h]. When written in the Cyrillic alphabet, [h] is reprented with the additional (not found in the Russian alphabet) letter Һ (lower case: һ). When written in the Latin alphabet, [h] is represented by "h". When written in the Arabic alphabet, [h] is represented by ھ.

Romanian

Romanian has [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "h", as in hăţ (bridle).

Romanian is the only widely-spoken contemporary Romance language that retains the phoneme /h/ of Latin (the much less widely-spoken Norman language has also retained it). This is widely believed to be due to Slavonic influence.

Spanish

Some dialects of Spanish, particularly in the Americas, have [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by j (and g in front of e and i), as in José (Joseph). As in most Romance languages, the original [h] phoneme was dropped from the original Latin (as can be seen in Spanish words that start with h, e.g. ¡Hasta la vista!). The [h] phoneme in the dialects that have it is the same as the phoneme that is pronounced [x] or [χ] in other kinds of Spanish (see Castilian).

Uzbek

Uzbek has the phoneme [h]. When written in the Cyrillic alphabet, [h] is reprented with the additional (not found in the Russian alphabet) letter Ҳ (lower case: ҳ). When written in the Latin alphabet, [h] is represented by "h".

See also

• Voiced glottal fricative, a common allophone in numerous languages
• List of phonetics topics