Voiceless glottal fricative

Voiceless glottal fricative
h
IPA Number146
Audio sample
Encoding
Entity (decimal)h
Unicode (hex)U+0068
X-SAMPAh
Braille⠓ (braille pattern dots-125)
Voiceless glottal phonation
h
Braille⠓ (braille pattern dots-125)

The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless glottal transition or the aspirate,[1][2] is a type of sound used in some spoken languages that patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant phonologically, but often lacks the usual phonetic characteristics of a consonant. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨h⟩. However, [h] has been described as a voiceless phonation because in many languages, it lacks the place and manner of articulation of a prototypical consonant, as well as the height and backness of a prototypical vowel:

[h and ɦ] have been described as voiceless or breathy voiced counterparts of the vowels that follow them [but] the shape of the vocal tract [...] is often simply that of the surrounding sounds. [...] Accordingly, in such cases it is more appropriate to regard h and ɦ as segments that have only a laryngeal specification, and are unmarked for all other features. There are other languages [such as Hebrew and Arabic] which show a more definite displacement of the formant frequencies for h, suggesting it has a [glottal] constriction associated with its production.[3]

An effort undertaken at the Kiel Convention in 1989 attempted to move glottal fricatives, both voiceless and voiced, to approximants.[4][5] The fricative may be represented with the extIPA diacritic for strong articulation, ⟨⟩.

The Shanghainese language, among others, contrasts voiced and voiceless glottal fricatives.[6]

  1. ^ Smyth (1920, §16: description of stops and h)
  2. ^ Wright & Wright (1925, §7h: initial h)
  3. ^ Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:325–326)
  4. ^ Ladefoged (1990), p. 24–25.
  5. ^ Garellek et al. (2021).
  6. ^ Qian 2003, pp.14-16.