Glottal stop
A glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. It is familiar to English-speakers as the catch in the middle of "uh-oh". The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is.
As a result of the action of the glottis, glottal vibration either stops or becomes irregular with a low rate and sudden drop in intensity.
Features
Features of a glottal stop:- It has no phonation at all, as there is no airflow through the glottis. It is voiceless, however, in the sense that it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
Writing
Other scripts also have letters used for representing glottal stops, such as the Hebrew letter aleph and the Cyrillic letter palochka, used in several Caucasian languages. The Arabic script uses hamza, which can appear both as a diacritic and as an independent letter. In Tundra Nenets, it is represented by the letters apostrophe and double apostrophe. In Japanese, glottal stops occur at the end of interjections of surprise or anger and are represented by the character.
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 is always pronounced with an unrepresented glottal stop before that vowel. Some orthographies use a hyphen instead of the reverse apostrophe if the glottal stop occurs in the middle of the word. If it occurs in the end of a word, the last vowel can be written with a circumflex accent if both a stress and a glottal stop occur in 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, especially some of the Salishan languages, have adopted the IPA letter into their orthographies. In some of them, it occurs as a casing pair, and. The digit or a question mark is sometimes substituted for, and is preferred in languages such as Squamish. SENĆOŦENwhose alphabet is mostly unique from other Salish languagescontrastly 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 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, while continuing to challenge the policy.
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.
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, would be rendered Tha Gàidhlig a'am.
In the Nawdm language of Ghana, the glottal stop is written ɦ, capital Ĥ.
In English
Replacement of /t/
In English, the glottal stop occurs as an open juncture and allophonically in t-glottalization. In British English, the glottal stop is most familiar in the Cockney pronunciation of "butter" as "bu'er". Geordie English often uses glottal stops for t, k, and p, and has a unique form of glottalization. Additionally, there is the glottal stop as a null onset for English; in other words, it is the non-phonemic glottal stop occurring before isolated or initial vowels.Often a glottal stop happens at the beginning of vowel phonation after a silence.
Although this segment is not a phoneme in English, it occurs 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: stop, that, knock, watch, also leap, soak, help, pinch.
In American English, a "t" is usually not aspirated in syllables ending either in a vowel + "t", such as "cat" or "outside"; or in a "t" + unstressed vowel + "n", such as "mountain" or "Manhattan". This is referred to as a "held t" as the airflow is stopped by tongue at the ridge behind the teeth. However, there is a trend of younger speakers in the Mid-Atlantic states to replace the "held t" with a glottal stop, so that "Manhattan" sounds like "Man-haʔ-in" or "Clinton" like "Cliʔ-in", where "ʔ" is the glottal stop. This may have crossed over from African American Vernacular English, particularly that of New York City.
Before initial vowels
Most English speakers today often use a glottal stop before the initial vowel of words beginning with a vowel, particularly at the beginning of sentences or phrases or when a word is emphasized. This is also known as "hard attack". Traditionally in Received Pronunciation, "hard attack" was seen as a way to emphasize a word. Today, in British, American and other varieties of English, it is increasingly used not only to emphasize but also simply to separate two words, especially when the first word ends in a glottal stop.Occurrence in other languages
In many languages that do not allow a sequence of vowels, such as Persian, the glottal stop may be used epenthetically to prevent such a hiatus. There are intricate interactions between falling tone and the glottal stop in the histories of such languages as Danish, Cantonese and Thai.In many languages, the unstressed intervocalic allophone of the glottal stop is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant. It is known to be contrastive in only one language, Gimi, in which it is the voiced equivalent of the stop.
lītora jactētur odiīs Jūnōnis inīquae
The table below demonstrates how widely the sound of glottal stop is found among the world's spoken languages: