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The glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ʔ. The glottal stop is the sound made when the vocal cords are pressed together to stop the flow of air and then released, and is the sound in the middle of the interjection uh-oh.
Features
Features of the glottal stop:
- Its manner of articulation is plosive or stop, which means it is produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract.
- 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.
- Because it is pronounced in the throat; without a component in the mouth, the central/lateral dichotomy does not apply.
- 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
There are few words in English that universally contain a glottal stop. The best known examples are the interjections "uh-oh" and "uh-uh". The p in "yep" and "nope" for yes and no may have originally represented glottal stops, but the words are now typically read with a .
However, in many dialects of English, glottal stop is an allophone of /t/ in final position, as in habit or pat. In dialects such as Cockney and Estuary English, the glottal stop is also an allophone of /t/ in medial position as well, as in bottle, water or fatter. In East Anglian varieties, glottal stop realisations of /t/ can be found in word-*initial* position, if the /t/ is a) in an unstressed syllable (so is often found in the words 'to', 'today', 'tomorrow') AND is not in tone group-initial position. So in "I'm going to town tomorrow", the /t/ in 'to' and 'tomorrow' are readily realised as glottal stops. In other dialects, a /t/ followed by a syllabic /n/ is often replaced by a glottal stop, as for example in button or fatten. (This may be obscured if the speaker consciously articulates consonants for clarity.) More rarely, glottal stop may be an allophone of /k/ in medial or final position, particularly in the discourse marker 'like'.
With many Yorkshire dialects, a glottalized /t/ is used as a replacement of the word "the", as shown in the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition sketch by Monty Python, where Graham Chapman states "There's trouble at t' mill!". Or when John Cleese exclaims, "I'm going down t'market."
Finally, there are loanwords into English, usually from languages where the glottal stop is a phoneme, where a glottal stop is part of the accepted pronunciation, for example Hawaiʻian ʻaʻa lava.
In other languages
In many languages, the glottal stop is a full phoneme. In languages using the Latin alphabet, it is often written as an opening single quote ‘, as in Hawai‘ian. Other languages, such as Danish, have the glottal stop as a suprasegmental feature.
Arabic
In Arabic, the glottal stop is a full phoneme, represented by the letter ء (hamza).
Burmese
In Burmese, all finals (represented with a -္), except for nasalised -n sounds, are glottal stops.
Danish
In Danish, the glottal stop is used the same way as Swedish and Norwegian tones, to mark that a word has another meaning. The word hjælper means 'helps', but with the glottal stop it means 'helper'.
Dutch
In Dutch, the glottal stop is not phonemic, but it is inserted in multi-morphemic words before morphemes that begin with a vowel, for example beamen ("to endorse"), where the glottal stop may be inserted after the prefix "be-". Normal words starting with a vowel also may receive a glottal in front if they are pronounced with emphasis, as in German.
The few exceptions where the presence or not of the glottal would change the meaning of a word is in zoeven ("to whiz") versus zoëven ("just now"); koop ("buy") versus coöp ("cooperative"). In such cases the trema is used to indicate the break. And even here one can argue that the Dutch oe is not a real diphthong but just a single vowel.
The Dutch dialects West Flemish and Zeelandic however, make frequent use of glottal stops. In many words, the k may be replaced by a glottal stop. This also sometimes occurs for t or p sounds.
Finnish
In Finnish, the glottal stop may occur in word-initial, central or final position. In central position it can be found as a result of lenition of /k/ and is written with an apostrophe (genitive of vaaka: vaa'an ). Some words (mainly substantives ending in -e and imperative forms) end with a glottal stop, which is not written and is omitted by many speakers. However it tends to assimilate with the initial consonant of the following word, pronounced as a doubled consonant; for example vaate + kauppa becomes vaatekauppa . In initial position the glottal stop may be used to separate vowels of different words; for example, anna omena , linja-auto . In spelling, it may be indicated by a space (separate words), or a hyphen (identical vowels adjacent in compound words), or with no notation at all. Short, stressed vowels may trigger the introduction of a glottal stop; arguably, there is a minimal pair for the word tienesteillä between "with road blockages" and "with earnings". In casual speech, however, the glottal stop is not used much, and all these cases may equally well be rendered with different degrees and placements of stress.
The colloquial spoken Finnish exhibits a completely different phenomenon, where the syncope of word-final /n/ actually produces a hiatus or a glottal stop. This makes the glottal stop a regular genitive case marker in e.g. the Savo dialect. For example, standard se on ollut "it has been" is rendered as se o ollu . More often than not, this glottal stop is immediately assimilated to the following consonant as per regular sandhi, e.g. standard se on minun "it is mine" to se o mu .
German
In northern and central German, a glottal stop is inserted between every two adjacent vowels that do not form a diphthong, for example Beamter ("civil servant"), beeilen ("hurry"), Ruine ("ruin" noun), or Luise (personal name). (This is a common mistake Germans make when pronouncing foreign languages like English or French.) Otherwise (and in other German-speaking areas) the glottal stop is only used in front of words (or, for faster speakers, sentences) that begin with a vowel.
In addition glottal stops are often inserted at morpheme boundaries: enterben (ent- + erben; "disinherit") often becomes .
Guaraní
In Guaraní, the glottal stop is a full consonant. It is denoted by the letter ’, called puso (see Guaraní alphabet). Compare kua "hole" with ku’a "waist".
Hebrew
In Hebrew, the glottal stop is a full phoneme. It is denoted by the letter Aleph (א).
Maltese
In Maltese, the glottal stop is a full phoneme. It is denoted by the letter q.
Norwegian
It is used in some dialects.
Polynesian
Many Polynesian languages, though not all, feature the glottal stop as a full phoneme. If it is denoted, an apostrophe is used, although the modifier letter turned comma 'ʻ' is usually deemed proper. It is called ʻokina in Hawaiʻian, fakauʻa in Tongan, ʻeta in Tahitian and so on. Very often, however, Tongan excepted, it is ignored. Although some English speakers pronounce glottal stops in Hawaiʻian words, the vast majority do not. Even in the name Hawaiʻi, it is most often omitted.
Võro
In Võro, the glottal stop is a full phoneme. It is denoted by the letter q and is often the only differentiator of meaning in the Nominative plural, e.g. singular kala, pini, maa 'fish, dog, land', plural kalaq, piniq, maaq 'fishes, dogs, lands'. ʔ is also marker of imperative, e.g. annaq, mineq 'give, go'. At the same time it is obvious that the q phoneme in Võro is not a completely usual phoneme as regards its specific conditions of occurrence: (a) q occurs only word-finally after a vowel or a voiced consonant; (b) q does not palatalize; (c) there is no length opposition in the pronunciation of q. As a rule Võro glottal stop occurs as a grammatical marker whereas it rarely acts as a differentiator of lexical meaning. The fact that the glottal stop does not change the main meaning of the word is evidenced by its (variable) occurrence in forms where it is historically secondary, and mainly concentrates the form in the information structure of the sentence, e.g. pronouns maq, saq 'I, you' ; particles noq, külq 'now, yes'. Particularly productive is the usage of particles containing ʔ.
Other
Other examples of languages using a phonemic glottal stop are Nahuatl (and many other Native American languages) and the constructed Klingon language from the TV series Star Trek.
