Glottal consonant - Definition and Overview

Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis.

Glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
	voicless glottal stop	Hawai‘ian	‘okina	[ʔo.ˈki.na]	‘okina
	voiced glottal fricative	Czech	Praha	[pra.ɦa]	Prague
	voiceless glottal fricative	English	hat	[hæt]	hat

Note:

• The glottal stop occurs in many languages. Often, all vocal attacks are preceded by a voiceless glottal stop, for exemple in German. The French language distinguishes between the letter H normally not pronounced – also with "liaison" – and the glottal stop letter H, like in the word "les héros" (don't pronounce "les zéros"). The Hawaiian language writes the glottal stop as an opening single quote ‘. Some languages like the Arabic have a dedicated letter (called "Hamza") for the glottal stop consonant. For more details on this topic, see: Glottal stop.

See also

• Glottalic consonant
• Place of articulation
• List of phonetics topics