Glottal stop
- This article is about the sound. For the letter, see glottal stop (letter).
| IPA Number | 113 | ||
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| Audio sample | |||
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| X-SAMPA | ? | ||
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The glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ʔ. The glottal stop is the sound made when the vocal cords are pressed together to stop the flow of air and then released; for example, the break seperating the syllables of the interjection uh-oh.
Features
Features of the glottal stop:
- Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
- Its place of articulation is glottal which means it is articulated by the vocal folds.
- Its phonation type is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords.
- 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.
Occurrence
In English
There are few words in English that universally contain a glottal stop. The best known examples are the interjections "uh-oh" (or "oh-oh") and "uh-uh".
However, in many varieties of English, glottal stop is an allophone of /t/ in final position, as in habit or pat. In such accents as Cockney and Estuary English, the glottal stop is also an allophone of /t/ in medial position, as in Batman, bottle, and water. In East Anglian varieties, glottal-stop realisations of /t/ can be found in word-initial position, if /t/ is in an unstressed syllable (so is often found in the words to, today, tomorrow) and is not in tone group–initial position. So, in "I'm going to town tomorrow", the /t/ in to and tomorrow is readily realised as a glottal stop. In other dialects, a /t/ followed by a syllabic /n/ is often replaced by a glottal stop, as for example in button or fatten. (This may be obscured if the speaker consciously articulates consonants for clarity.)
In many Yorkshire accents, a glottalized /t/ is used as a replacement of the word "the", as shown in the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition sketch by Monty Python, in which Graham Chapman states "There's trouble at t' mill!", and as when John Cleese exclaims "I'm going down t'market."
The glottal stop may be an allophone of /k/: at the ends of words (for example, in the discourse marker like); medially (for example, [lʌʔɪ] in Michael Palin's "You lucky bastard!" in Monty Python's Life of Brian); and at the beginnings of words that follow words ending in vowel sounds (for example, "You can open the door now").
Glottal stops are also found in some forms of African-American Vernacular English: for example, the t in satin or the final d in words ending in "d" (such as had or started).
Many dialects of American English will now even replace a d followed by syllabic /n/ with the glottal stop, as in sudden, or widen. Another possibility is that there is coarticulation going on in this case, where at the same time that the glottal stop is made, the tongue is in the position to form the alveolar plosive. In minimal pairs in which both d and t have mutated into the glottal stop, the pairs can be differentiated by vowel length. For example, the /i/ sound of Sweden is longer than the one in the word sweaten.
Historically
The actual loss of the glottal stop, or mutation from /ʔ/ to the null symbol /Ø/, accounts for a lot of seemingly "silent" t's in the middle of numerous words in the English language. There's sufficient reason to believe that the word, listen was once pronounced with a full /t/ sound. Due to the environment of this t (being in an unstressed syllable immediately followed by a syllabic /n/ or syllabic /l/ even), this alveolar plosive /t/ was later replaced by the glottal plosive /ʔ/, and then, the glottal sound was eventually dropped altogether. Being the English language of course, the orthography, or spelling did not change in order to accomodate this new change in pronunciation. Which also explains other words that were bestowed with the same fate, ie. castle, whistle, fasten, hustle, bustle, and others.
The word often is a special case, because while most people don't even pronounce any plosive right after the f, some will still give a glottal stop, and still others (though they might be consciously overarticulating) do indeed pronounced a hard /t/ sound.
Finally, English acquires, usually from languages in which the glottal stop is a phoneme, loanwords in which glottal stops are part of the foreign pronunciation. For example, the Hawaiian word ‘a‘ā is used by geologists to specify lava that is relatively thick, chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two glottal stops in the word; but the most widely used English spelling, aa, does not (Pukui and Elbert 1986:2, 389). Loans often retain aspects of their foreign pronunciation until they become fully nativized in the adoptive language.
Words in North American English typically displaying the glottal stop:
- important
- certain
- sentence
- cotton
- rotten
- gotten, forgotten
- beaten
- written, ridden
- mitten
- bitten
- kitten
- smitten
- mountain
- fountain
- mouton
- frighten
- lighten, enlighten
- brighten
- tighten
- highten
- Latin
- Satan
- patent
- blatant
- eaten, Eden
- student
- pardon
- maiden
- garden
- Manhattan
- Staten Island
- Burton, Milton, Aiden, Clinton, Martin, Norton
- words in the gerund that lose their final g, whose root already ended in /t/, such as, hurtin, spittin, cuttin, etc.
- whenever you create a verb from any other word ending in "t" or "d" by adding the suffix -en: sad to sadden
- you'll even get it a times in words with the negative contraction like, didn't, couldn't, or wouldn't
- or even still, across words. For example, the /t/ in the word Pat is generally pronounced with an inaudible release or no release at all. In rapid speech, Pat and Andy becomes /pæʔtn ændi/
In other languages
- Abkhaz: аи [ʔaj], "no"
- Arabic: ألله [ʔɑlˁlˁɑːh], "God, Allah"
- Burmese: ka [kʰaʔ], "draw off"
- Chamorro: halu'u [həluʔu], "shark"
- Czech: používat [po.ʔuʒiːvat], "to use"
- Danish: hånd [hɞnʔ], "hand"
- Dutch: beamen [bɛʔɑmən], "to affirm"
- Filipino: doon [dəˈʔon], "over there"
- Finnish: linja-auto [ˈlinjɑʔˈɑuto], "bus"
- French: les hérissons [le ʔeʁisɔ̃], "the hedgehogs"
- German (northern dialects): Beamter [bəˈʔamtɐ], "civil servant"
- Guaraní: avañe’ẽ [aʋaɲẽˈʔẽ], "Guaraní"
- Hawaiian: ‘ele‘ele [ˡʔɛ.lɛˡʔɛ.lɛ], "black"
- Hebrew: עִבְרִית [ʔivˈʁit], "Hebrew"
- Japanese もっと[moʔto], "more"
- Kabardian: Iэ [ʔɛ], "to tell"
- Lojban: .a'o [ʔaho], "hope"
- Maltese: qattus [ˈʔattus], "cat"
- Persian: معني [maʔni], "meaning"
- Seri: he [ʔɛ], "I"
- Paraguayan Spanish: el débil es [el deʋil ʔeh], "the weak one is"
- Tongan: tuʻu [tuʔu], "stand"
- Tahitian: puaʻa [puaʔa], "pig"
- Vietnamese: bà [ʔɓɐ̤ː˧˩] "lady"
- Võro: piniq [ˈpinʲiʔ], "dogs"
- Welayta: [ʔirʈa], "wet"
