Voiceless glottal fricative - Definition and Overview

IPA - Unicode	h
IPA - image
X-SAMPA	h
Kirshenbaum	h
Sound sample

The voiceless glottal fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is h, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is h. The voiceless glottal fricative occurs in English, and it is the sound denoted by the letter "h" in hot or happy. Features of this consonant:

• Its manner of articulation is fricative, which means it is produced by constricting air flow through a narrow channel at the place of articulation, causing turbulence.
• 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.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by allowing the airstream to flow over the middle of the tongue, rather than the sides.
• 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.

In English

Most dialects of English have [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "h", as in happy. It usually occurs at the beginning of a morpheme.

In some dialects of British English, the [h] sound is muted. This may be confusing to some speakers, particularly Americans, such as when they see the phrase "an historic occasion". There are actually a few words in English where the standard pronunciation has a muted initial "h", such as honor and hour.

In other languages

Speakers of many languages, which lack an /h/ and may use the letter "h" for different values, may substitute /x/ for /h/ or not pronounce it at all.

Basque

Some dialects of Basque have [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "h". In other dialects, [h] has been dropped, and in some spelling systems for these dialects, the "h" is no longer written. This particular dialectical variation was one of the largest difficulties in unifying the dialects of Basque.

German

German has [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "h", as in Hand (hand).

Kazakh

Kazakh has the phoneme [h]. When written in the Cyrillic alphabet, [h] is reprented with the additional (not found in the Russian alphabet) letter Һ (lower case: һ). When written in the Latin alphabet, [h] is represented by "h".

Romanian

Romanian has [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "h", as in hăţ (bridle).

Romanian is the only widely-spoken contemporary Romance language that retains the phoneme /h/ (the much less widely-spoken Norman language also retains phoneme /h/). This is widely believed to be due to Slavonic influence.

Spanish

Some dialects of Spanish, particularly in the Americas, have [h] as a phoneme, and it is represented by "j", as in Jose (Joseph). As in most Romance languages, the original [h] phoneme was dropped from the original Latin (as can be seen in Spanish words that start with "h", e.g. Hasta la vista!). The [h] phoneme in the dialects that have appears not to have been retained from Latin, but is rather an alternate realization of the original Castilian phoneme /x/.