Glottal stop

Features of a glottal stop:

• Its manner of articulation is occlusive, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. Since the airflow is blocked entirely, the consonant is a plosive.

* Its place of articulation is glottal, which means it is articulated at and by the vocal cords (vocal folds).

• It has no phonation at all, as there is no airflow through the glottis.^[2] Because of this, the typical oral–nasal dichotomy does not apply.
  • Glottal closure may be regarded as a phonation state, in which case the consonant is a segmental realization.
  • The consonant may still be regarded as "voiceless" in the sense that it is produced without any vibration of the vocal cords.

*Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the median–lateral dichotomy does not apply.

* Its airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air only with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most speech sounds.

The table below demonstrates how widely glottal stops are found among the world's spoken languages:

In the traditional romanization of many languages, such as Arabic, a glottal stop is transcribed with the apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩ or the symbol ⟨ʾ⟩, which 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 rotated apostrophe, ⟨ʻ⟩ (called ʻokina in Hawaiian and Samoan), which is commonly used to transcribe the Arabic ayin as well (also ⟨ʽ⟩) 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⟩ (at the end of words), in Võro and Maltese by ⟨q⟩. Another way of writing the glottal stop is the saltillo ⟨Ꞌ ꞌ⟩, used in languages such as Tlapanec and Rapa Nui.

Other scripts also have letters used for representing glottal stops, such as the Hebrew letter aleph ⟨א‎⟩ and the Cyrillic letter palochka ⟨Ӏ⟩, used in several Caucasian languages. The Arabic script uses hamza ⟨ء⟩, which can appear both as a diacritic and as an independent letter (though not part of the alphabet). 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, glottal stops have 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 in Modern German and Hausa). Some orthographies use a hyphen instead of the reverse apostrophe if the glottal stop occurs in the middle of the word (e.g. Tagalog pag-ibig, "love"; or Visayan gabi-i, "night"). If it occurs in the end of a word, the last vowel can be written with a circumflex accent (known as the pakupyâ) if both a stress and a glottal stop occur in the final vowel (e.g. basâ, "wet") or a grave accent (known as the paiwà) if the glottal stop occurs at the final vowel, but the stress occurs at the penultimate syllable (e.g. batà, "child").^[38][39][40]

Some Canadian indigenous languages, especially some of the Salishan languages, have adopted the IPA letter ⟨ʔ⟩ into their orthographies. In some of them, it occurs as a casing pair, ⟨Ɂ⟩ and ⟨ɂ⟩.^[41] The digit ⟨7⟩ or a question mark is sometimes substituted for ⟨ʔ⟩, and is preferred in languages such as Squamish. SENĆOŦEN – whose alphabet is mostly unique from other Salish languages – contrastly uses the comma ⟨,⟩ to represent the glottal stop, though it is optional.

In 2015, two women in the Northwest Territories challenged the territorial government over its refusal to permit them to use the letter ⟨ʔ⟩ in their daughters' names: Sahaiʔa, a Chipewyan name, and Sakaeʔah, a Slavey name (the two names are actually cognates). 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.^[42]

In the Crow language, the glottal stop is written as a question mark ⟨?⟩. The only instance of the glottal stop in Crow is as a question marker morpheme at the end of a sentence.^[43]

Use of the glottal stop is a distinct characteristic of the Southern Mainland Argyll dialects of Scottish Gaelic. In such a dialect, the standard Gaelic phrase Tha Gàidhlig agam ("I speak Gaelic"), would be rendered Tha Gàidhlig a'am.^{[citation needed]}

In the Nawdm language of Ghana, the glottal stop is written ɦ, capital Ĥ.

• Saltillo
• Index of phonetics articles
• Hamza
• Voiced pharyngeal fricative
• Creaky-voiced glottal approximant
• Aleph