The glottal stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken
languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more
precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that
represents this sound is ⟨ʔ⟩. In English, the glottal stop is
represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh!. For most United States
English speakers, a glottal stop is used as an allophone of between a vowel and
a syllabic "n", as in button or mountain, except when talking slowly. In
British English, the glottal stop is most familiar in the Cockney
pronunciation of "butter" as "bu'er". Features
Features of the glottal stop: Its manner of articulation is occlusive,
which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
Since the consonant is also oral, with no nasal outlet, the airflow is blocked
entirely, and the consonant is a stop. Its phonation 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 air is allowed to escape through the mouth
only. Because the sound is not produced with
airflow over the tongue, the central–lateral dichotomy does not
apply. The airstream mechanism is pulmonic,
which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm,
as in most sounds. Phonology and symbolization of the
glottal stop in selected languages Although this segment is not a written
phoneme in English, it is present phonetically in nearly all dialects of
English as an allophone of in the syllable coda. Speakers of Cockney,
Scottish English and several other British dialects also pronounce an
intervocalic between vowels as in city. In Received Pronunciation, a glottal
stop is inserted before a tautosyllabic voiceless stop, 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, Chinese and Thai.
In many languages, the unstressed intervocalic allophone of the glottal
stop is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant. These are only known to be
contrastive in one language, Gimi, where it is the voiced equivalent of the stop.
= Writing = 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 ⟨ʔ⟩. In many Polynesian
languages that use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written
with a reversed apostrophe, ⟨‘⟩, which, confusingly, is also used to transcribe
the Arabic ayin and is the source of the IPA character for the voiced pharyngeal
fricative ⟨ʕ⟩. In Malay the glottal stop is represented by the letter ⟨k⟩, in
Võro and Maltese by ⟨q⟩. Other scripts also have letters used for
representing the glottal stop, such as the Hebrew letter aleph ⟨א⟩, and the
Cyrillic letter palochka ⟨Ӏ⟩ used in several Caucasian languages. In Tundra
Nenets it is represented by the letters apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩ and double apostrophe
⟨ˮ⟩. In Japanese, glottal stops occur at the end of interjections of surprise or
anger, and are represented by the character ⟨っ⟩.
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 is always pronounced with an unrepresented glottal stop before
that vowel. Some orthographies employ a hyphen, instead of the reverse
apostrophe, if the glottal stop occurs in the middle of the word. When it
occurs in the end of a Tagalog word, the last vowel is written with a circumflex
accent, if both a stress and a glottal stop occurs at the final vowel; or a
grave accent, if the glottal stop occurs at the final vowel, but the stress
occurs at the penultimate syllable. Some Canadian indigenous languages have
adopted the phonetic symbol "ʔ" itself as part of their orthographies. In some
of them, it occurs as a pair of uppercase and lowercase characters, Ɂ
and ɂ. Sometimes the number symbol 7 is used if the ʔ character is not available
to the typesetter, and in some cases such as in the Squamish language, the 7
has become the preferred symbol. In 2015, two women in the Northwest
Territories challenged the territorial government over its refusal to permit
them to use the ʔ character in their daughters' names: Sahaiʔa, a Chipewyan
name, and Sakaeʔah, a Slavey name. The territory argued that territorial and
federal identity documents were unable to accommodate the character. The women
registered the names with hyphens instead of the ʔ, while continuing to
challenge the policy. Use of the glottal stop is a distinct
characteristic of the Southern Mainland Argyll dialects of Scottish Gaelic. In a
such a dialect, the standard Gaelic phrase Tha Gàidhlig agam, would be
rendered Tha Gàidhlig a'am. Glottal stop in world languages
This table demonstrates how widely the sound of glottal stop is found among the
world's spoken languages. It is not intended to be a complete list. Any of
the languages which appear may have varieties which are not represented in
the table. See also
Stød in Danish Saltillo
Hamza in Arabic T-glottalization in English
Vocal hiccup Index of phonetics articles
References Bibliography