Voiceless glottal affricate
 | This article's factual accuracy is disputed. (November 2025) |
| Voiceless glottal affricate | |
|---|---|
| ʔh | |
| IPA number | 113 146 |
| Audio sample | |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | ʔh |
| Unicode (hex) | U+0294 U+0068 |
| X-SAMPA | ?_h |
A voiceless glottal affricate is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represent this sound are ⟨ʔ͡h⟩ and ⟨ʔ͜h⟩. The tie bar may be omitted, yielding ⟨ʔh⟩.
Features
[edit]Features of a voiceless glottal affricate:
- Its manner of articulation is affricate, which means it is produced by first stopping the airflow entirely, then allowing air flow through a constricted channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
- Its place of articulation is glottal, which means it is articulated at and by the vocal cords (vocal folds).
- Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
- It is an oral consonant, which means that air is not allowed to escape through the nose.
- 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.
Occurrence
[edit]| Language | Word | IPA | Meaning | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | Received Pronunciation[1] | hat | [ʔ͡haʔt] | 'hat' | Possible allophone of /h/, especially in stressed syllables.[1][unreliable source?] See English phonology |
Notes
[edit]- 1 2 Collins & Mees (2003), p. 148.
References
[edit]- Collins, Beverley; Mees, Inger M. (2003) [First published 1981], The Phonetics of English and Dutch (5th ed.), Leiden: Brill Publishers, ISBN 9004103406
