| Ipa-Number: | 113 |
| Ipa: | 660 |
| Xsampa: | ? |
| Kirshenbaum: | ? |
| Sound: | Glottal stop.ogg |
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound which is used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is . The glottal stop is the sound made when the vocal cords (vocal folds) are (1) drawn together by muscular action to interrupt the flow of air being expelled from the lungs and then (2) released as pressure builds up below them; for example, the break separating the syllables of the interjection uh-oh. Strictly, the perception that it is a consonantal sound is produced by the release; the closure phase is necessarily silent because during it there is no airflow and the vocal cords are immobilized. It is called the glottal stop because the technical term for the gap between the vocal cords, which is closed up in the production of this sound, is the glottis. The term "glottal stop" is one of rather few technical terms of linguistics which have become well known outside the specialism.
While this segment is not a phoneme in English, it is present phonetically in nearly all dialects of English as an allophone of /t/. Most British English speakers will use it for the first "t" in fortnight, where a consonant follows immediately; speakers of Cockney and many other dialects will also use it for the "t" between vowels in city. It is variably present at word boundaries where a vowel follows at the beginning of the next word, as with the final "t" of "sort" in sort of.
Another common usage of the glottal stop as an allophone to 't' more commonly found in North America is in the environment in which the 't' is immediately followed by a non-syllabic 'n' sound, as in mutant or important.
In many languages which do not allow a sequence of spoken vowel sounds, such as Persian, the glottal stop may be used to break up such a sequence. There are intricate interactions between falling tone and the glottal stop in the histories of such languages as Danish (cf. stød), Chinese and Thai.
In the traditional Romanization of many languages, such as Arabic, the glottal stop is transcribed with an apostrophe, <’>, and this is the source of the IPA letter . In many Polynesian languages which use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written with a reversed apostrophe, <‘> (called ‘okina in Hawaiian), which, confusingly, is also used to transcribe the Arabic ayin and is the source of the IPA character for the voiced pharyngeal fricative <>. In Malay, it is represented by the letter . Representing the glottal stop is one of the functions of the Hebrew letter aleph.
In the graphic representation of most Philippine languages, the glottal stop has 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 also in Modern German and Hausa). Some orthographies employ a hyphen, instead of the reverse apostrophe, if the glottal stop occurs in the middle of the word (e.g. Tagalog pag-ibig 'love'). When it occurs in the end of a Tagalog word, the last vowel is written with a circumflex accent (if the accent is on the last syllable) or a grave accent (if the accent occurs at the penultimate syllable).
Features of the glottal stop:
| Language | Word | IPA | Meaning | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abkhaz | Abkhazian: [[Abkhaz alphabet|аи]] | 'no' | See Abkhaz phonology | ||
| Arabic | Standard | Arabic: [[Arabic alphabet|الله ]] | 'God, 'Allah' | See Arabic phonology | |
| Metropolitan dialects | شقة | 'apartment' | Corresponds to in Standard Arabic. | ||
| Bikol | Bikol: [[Latin alphabet|''ba-go'' ]] | 'new' | |||
| Burmese | Burmese: [[Burmese script|မ္ရစ္မ္ယား]] | 'rivers' | |||
| Cebuano | Cebuano: [[Latin alphabet|''bag-o'']] | 'new' | |||
| Chamorro | Chamorro: [[Latin alphabet|''halu'u'']] | 'shark' | |||
| Chechen | Chechen: [[Cyrillic alphabet| кхоъ]] / Chechen: [[Latin alphabet|''qo''']] | 'three' | |||
| Chinese | Shanghainese | Chinese: [[Chinese Characters|一级了]]/Chinese: ''i'''q'''ci'''q'''l'''h'''e'''q''''' | 'superb' | ||
| Czech | Czech: [[Czech orthography|''používat'']] | 'to use' | See Czech phonology | ||
| Danish | Danish: [[Danish alphabet|''hånd'']] | 'hand' | See Danish phonology | ||
| Dutch | Dutch; Flemish: [[Dutch orthography|''beamen'']] | 'to confirm' | See Dutch phonology | ||
| English | Cockney | English: [[English orthography|''ca'''t''''']] | 'cat' | Allophone of . See glottalization and English phonology | |
| GA | |||||
| RP or GA | button | 'button' | |||
| Scottish Dialect | |||||
| Finnish | Finnish: [[Finnish alphabet|''linja-auto'']] | 'bus' | See Finnish phonology | ||
| German | northern dialects | German: [[German orthography|''Beamter'']] | 'civil servant' | See German phonology | |
| Guaraní | Guarani: [[Guaraní alphabet|''avañe'''’'''ẽ'']] | 'Guaraní' | Occurs only between vowels | ||
| Hawaiian | Hawaiian: [[Hawaiian alphabet|'''''{{okinaeleʻele]]}} | 'black' | See Hawaiian phonology | ||
| Hebrew | Hebrew: [[Hebrew alphabet|מ'''א'''מר]] | 'article' | See Hebrew phonology | ||
| Indonesian | Indonesian: [[Latin alphabet|''ba'''k'''so'' ]] | 'meatball' | Allophone of or in the syllable coda | ||
| Kabardian | Kabardian: [[Cyrillic alphabet|'''I'''э]] | 'to tell' | |||
| Maltese | Maltese: [[Maltese alphabet|'''''q'''attus'']] | 'cat' | |||
| Persian | Persian: [[Persian alphabet|معني ]] | 'meaning' | See Persian phonology | ||
| Pirahã | [[Latin alphabet|''baí'''x'''i'']] | 'parent' | |||
| Rotuman | 'to box' | ||||
| Seri | [[Seri alphabet|'''''h'''e'' ]] | 'I' | |||
| Tagalog | Tagalog: [[Filipino orthography|''iihi'']] | 'will urinate' | |||
| Tahitian | puaʻa | 'pig' | |||
| Tongan | tuʻu | 'stand' | |||
| Vietnamese | Vietnamese: [[Vietnamese alphabet|a]] | 'by the way' | See Vietnamese phonology | ||
| Võro | piniq | 'dogs' | |||
| Welayta | 'wet' | ||||
| Yapese | |||||