Glottal stop

This article is about the sound in spoken language. For the letter, see Glottal stop (letter). For consonants followed by superscript ˀ, see Glottalization.

Glottal stop
ʔ
IPA Number	113
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ʔ
Unicode (hex)	U+0294
X-SAMPA	?
Braille
Image

The glottal stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʔ⟩.

In English, the glottal stop is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh!. For most United States English speakers, a glottal stop is used as an allophone of /t/ between a vowel and a syllabic "n", as in button or mountain, except when talking slowly. In British English, the glottal stop is most familiar in the Cockney pronunciation of "butter" as "bu'er".

Features

Features of the glottal stop:

• Its manner of articulation is occlusive, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract. Since the consonant is also oral, with no nasal outlet, the airflow is blocked entirely, and the consonant is a stop.
• Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibration of the vocal cords; necessarily so, because the vocal cords are held tightly together, preventing vibration.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the central–lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the lungs and diaphragm, as in most sounds.

Phonology and symbolization of the glottal stop in selected languages

Although this segment is not a written phoneme in English, it is present phonetically in nearly all dialects of English as an allophone of /t/ in the syllable coda. Speakers of Cockney, Scottish English and several other British dialects also pronounce an intervocalic /t/ between vowels as in city. In Received Pronunciation, a glottal stop is inserted before a tautosyllabic voiceless stop, e.g. sto’p, tha’t, kno’ck, wa’tch, also lea’p, soa’k, hel’p, pin’ch.

In many languages that don't allow a sequence of vowels, such as Persian, the glottal stop may be used to break up such a hiatus. 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 many languages, the unstressed intervocalic allophone of the glottal stop is a creaky-voiced glottal approximant. These are only known to be contrastive in one language, Gimi, where it is the voiced equivalent of the stop.

Writing

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 character ⟨ʔ⟩. In many Polynesian languages that use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written with a reversed apostrophe, ⟨‘⟩ (called ‘okina in Hawaiian and Samoan), which, confusingly, is also used to transcribe the Arabic ayin and is the source of the IPA character for the voiced pharyngeal fricative ⟨ʕ⟩. In Malay the glottal stop is represented by the letter ⟨k⟩, in Võro and Maltese by ⟨q⟩.

Road sign in British Columbia showing the use of 7 to represent /ʔ/ in the Squamish language.

Other scripts also have letters used for representing the glottal stop, such as the Hebrew letter aleph ⟨א⟩, and the Cyrillic letter palochka ⟨Ӏ⟩ used in several Caucasian languages. In Tundra Nenets it is represented by the letters apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩ and double apostrophe ⟨ˮ⟩. In Japanese, glottal stops occur at the end of interjections of surprise or anger, and are represented by the character ⟨っ⟩.

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"; or Visayan gabi-i, "night"). When it occurs in the end of a Tagalog word, the last vowel is written with a circumflex accent (known as the pakupyâ), if both a stress and a glottal stop occurs at the final vowel (e.g. basâ, "wet"); or a grave accent (known as the paiwà), if the glottal stop occurs at the final vowel, but the stress occurs at the penultimate syllable (e.g. batà, "child").

Some Canadian indigenous languages have adopted the phonetic symbol "ʔ" itself as part of their orthographies. In some of them, it occurs as a pair of uppercase and lowercase characters, Ɂ and ɂ. Sometimes the number symbol 7 is used if the ʔ character is not available to the typesetter, and in some cases such as in the Squamish language, the 7 has become the preferred symbol.

In 2015, two women in the Northwest Territories challenged the territorial government over its refusal to permit them to use the ʔ character in their daughters' names: Sahaiʔa, a Chipewyan name, and Sakaeʔah, a Slavey name (the two names are actually cognates). The territory argued that territorial and federal identity documents were unable to accommodate the character. The women registered the names with hyphens instead of the ʔ, while continuing to challenge the policy.

Use of the glottal stop is a distinct characteristic of the Southern Mainland Argyll dialects of Scottish Gaelic. In a such a dialect, the standard Gaelic phrase Tha Gàidhlig agam (I have Gaelic), would be rendered Tha Gàidhlig a'am.

Glottal stop in world languages

This table demonstrates how widely the sound of glottal stop is found among the world's spoken languages. It is not intended to be a complete list. Any of the languages which appear may have varieties which are not represented in the table.

Language		Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Abkhaz		аи	[ʔaj]	'no'	See Abkhaz phonology.
Adyghe		Iэ	[ʔa]	'arm/hand'
Arabic	Standard	أغاني	[ʔaˈɣaːniː]	'songs'	See Arabic phonology, Hamza.
	Metropolitan	شقة	[ˈʃæʔʔæ]	'apartment'	Metropolitan dialects including Egyptian Arabic. Corresponds to /q/ in Literary Arabic.
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic		ܣܥܬ	[sʔɐt]	'clock' or 'watch'
Bikol		ba-go	[ˈbaːʔɡo]	'new'
Burmese		မြစ်များ	[mjiʔ mjà]	'rivers'
Cebuano		tubò	[ˈtuboʔ]	'to grow'
Chamorro		halu'u	[həluʔu]	'shark'
Chechen		кхоъ / qo'	[qoʔ]	'three'
Chinese	Cantonese	愛/oi3	[ʔɔːi˧]	'love'	See Cantonese phonology.
	Wu	一级了	[ʔiɪʔ.tɕiɪʔ.ʔləʔ]	'superb'
Czech		používat	[poʔuʒiːvat]	'to use'	See Czech phonology.
Danish		hånd	[ˈhɒ̜̽nʔ]	'hand'	One of the possible realizations of stød. Depending on the dialect and style of speech, it can be instead realized as laryngealisation of the preceding sound. See Danish phonology.
Dutch		beamen	[bəʔˈaːmə(n)]	'to confirm'	See Dutch phonology.
English	Received Pronunciation	uh-oh	[ˈɐʔəʊ]	'uh-oh'
	American		[ˈʌʔoʊ]
	Australian	cat	[kʰæʔ(t)]	'cat'	Allophone of /t/. See glottalization and English phonology.
	GA
	Estuary		[kʰæʔ]
	Cockney		[kʰɛ̝ʔ]
	RP and GA	button	<phonos file="En-us-button.ogg">[ˈbɐʔn̩]</phonos>	'button'
Esperanto		scii	[ˈst͡si.ʔi]	'to know'	See Esperanto phonology.
Finnish		linja-auto	[ˈlinjɑʔˌɑuto]	'bus'	See Finnish phonology.
German	Northern	Beamter	[bəˈʔamtɐ]	'civil servant'	See German phonology.
Guaraní		avañe’ẽ	[ãʋ̃ãɲẽˈʔẽ]	'Guaraní'	Occurs only between vowels.
Hawaiian		ʻeleʻele	[ˈʔɛlɛˈʔɛlɛ]	'black'	See Hawaiian phonology.
Hebrew		מאמר	[maʔămaʁ]	'article'	See Modern Hebrew phonology.
Icelandic		en	[ʔɛn]	'but'	Only used according to emphasis, never occurring in minimal pairs.
Iloko		nalab-ay	[nalabˈʔaj]	'bland tasting'	Hyphen when occurring within the word.
Indonesian		bakso	[ˌbäʔˈso]	'meatball'	Allophone of /k/ or /ɡ/ in the syllable coda.
Japanese	Kagoshima	柿	[kaʔ]	'persimmon'
Javanese		anak	[änäʔ]	'child'	Allophone of /k/ in morpheme-final position.
Kabardian		Iэ	[ʔa]	'arm/hand'
Kagayanen		?	[saˈʔaɡ]	'floor'
Korean		일	[ʔil]	'one'	In free variation with no glottal stop. Occurs only in initial position of word.
Malay		tidak	[ˈtidäʔ]	'no'	Allophone of final /k/ in the syllable coda, pronounced before consonants or at end of word.
Maltese		qattus	[ˈʔattus]	'cat'
Māori	Cook Island	taʻi	[taʔi]	'one'
Nahuatl		tahtli	[taʔtɬi]	'father'	Often left unwritten.
Nez Perce		yáakaʔ	[ˈjaːkaʔ]	'black bear'
Nheengatu		ai	[aˈʔi]	'sloth'	Transcription (or absence thereof) varies.
Okinawan		音	[ʔutu]	'sound'
Persian		معنی	[maʔni]	'meaning'	See Persian phonology.
Pirahã		baíxi	[ˈmàí̯ʔì]	'parent'
Portuguese	Vernacular Brazilian	ê-ê	[ˌʔe̞ˈʔeː]	ironic 'yeah, right!'	Marginal sound. Does not occur after or before a consonant. In Brazilian casual speech, there is at least one [ʔ]–vowel length–pitch accent minimal pair (triply unusual, the ideophones short ih vs. long ih). See Portuguese phonology.
	Some speakers	à aula	[ˈa ˈʔawlɐ]	'to the class'
Rotuman		ʻusu	[ʔusu]	'to box'
Samoan		maʻi	[maʔi]	'sickness, illness'
Sardinian	Some dialects of Barbagia	luna	[luʔa]	'moon'	Intervocalic allophone of /n, k, l/.
	Some dialects of Sarrabus
Serbo-Croatian		и онда / i onda	[iː ʔô̞n̪d̪a̠]	'and then'	Optionally inserted between vowels across word boundaries. See Serbo-Croatian phonology
Seri		he	[ʔɛ]	'I'
Spanish	Nicaraguan	más alto	[ˈma ˈʔal̻t̻o̞]	'higher'	Marginal sound or allophone of /s/ between vowels in different words. Does not occur after or before a consonant. See Spanish phonology.
	Yucateco	cuatro años	[ˈkwatɾo̞ ˈʔãɲo̞s]	'four years'
Tagalog		iihi	[ˌʔiːˈʔiːhɛʔ]	'will urinate'	See Tagalog phonology.
Tahitian		pua'a	[puaʔa]	'pig'
Thai		อา	[ʔaː]	'uncle'/'aunt' (father's younger sibling)
Tongan		tuʻu	[tuʔu]	'stand'
Tundra Nenets		выʼ	[wɨʔ]	'tundra'
Vietnamese		oi	[ʔɔj˧]	'sultry'	In free variation with no glottal stop. See Vietnamese phonology.
Võro		piniq	[ˈpinʲiʔ]	'dogs'	"q" is Võro plural marker (maa, kala, "land", "fish"; maaq, kalaq, "lands", "fishes").
Wagiman		jamh	[t̠ʲʌmʔ]	'eat'PERF
Welayta		[ʔirʈa]		'wet'
Wallisian		ma'uli	[maʔuli]	'life'

See also

• Stød in Danish
• Saltillo
• Hamza in Arabic
• T-glottalization in English
• Vocal hiccup
• Index of phonetics articles