Glottal stop

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 . 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" (sometimes spelled "oh-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 varieties of English, glottal stop is an allophone of /t/ in final position, as in habit or pat. In such accents as Cockney and Estuary English, the glottal stop is also an allophone of /t/ in medial position as well, as in bottle, water, and fatter. In East Anglian varieties, glottal-stop realisations of /t/ can be found in word-initial position, if the /t/ is 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 is readily realised as a glottal stop. 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.)

Glottal stop may be an allophone of /k/: at the ends of words (for example, in the discourse marker like); medially (for example, ^* in Michael Palin's "You lucky bastard!" in Monty Python's Life of Brian); and at the beginnings of words that follow words ending in vowel sounds (for example, "You can open the door now").

In many Yorkshire accents, 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, in which Graham Chapman states "There's trouble at t' mill!", and as when John Cleese exclaims "I'm going down t'market."

Glottal stops are also found in some forms of African-American Vernacular English: for example, the t in satin.

Finally, English acquires, usually from languages in which the glottal stop is a phoneme, loanwords in which glottal stops are part of the foreign pronunciation. For example, the Hawaiian word ‘a‘ā is used by geologists to specify lava that is relatively thick, chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two glottal stops in the word; but the most widely used English spelling, aa, does not (Pukui and Elbert 1986:2, 389). Loans often retain aspects of their foreign pronunciation until they become fully nativized in the adoptive language.

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 Hawaiian. 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 finals, are glottal stops. A glottal stop can occur in the initial and final position, but is not a full phoneme.

Czech

The use of the glottal stop is similar as in German. It is inserted between two adjacent vowels which do not form a diphthong (používat , to use), or preceeds a vowel for emphasising a boundary between words or parts of a word, e.g. trojúhelník (triangle), z okna (out of the window). But in some Moravian and Silesian dialects the glottal stop is usually omitted: , . It is never used in words of foreign origin (e.g. koala).

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.

An exception where the presence or not of the glottal would change the meaning of a word is koop ("buy") versus coöp ("cooperative"). In such cases the trema is used to indicate the break.

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 .

French

In French, the glottal stop is used for certain words beginning with an h. These words have a "h aspiré", which means they break the usual liaison with the word before them. The absence of liaison is often emphasized by a glottal stop, especially when one articulates. For instance, les hommes (the men) is pronounced with a liaison, but les hérissons (the hedgehogs) is pronounced with a "h aspiré" (no liaison) which may be emphasized as with a glottal stop.

German

In northern and central German, initial vowels are generally preceded by a glottal stop, for instance die Angst ‘the anguish’, acht ‘eight’. This glottal stop is pronounced as well if there is a prefix before the initial vowel, for instance Beamter ‘civil servant’ ← Amt ‘civil service’, or in compounds, for instance Spiegelei ‘fried egg’ ← Spiegel ‘mirror’ + Ei ‘egg’. The general insertion of a glottal stop before an initial vowel is a common mistake Germans make when pronouncing foreign languages like English or French.

In addition glottal stops are sometimes inserted between every two adjacent vowels that do not form a diphthong, for example Ruine ‘ruin’ (noun), or Oase ‘oasis’.

The Southern varieties of standard German often have no glottal stop at all. Several German dialects, especially in the South, don't have glottal stops.

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.

Micronesian

In Palauan the glottal stop is denoted by the letters 'ch'.

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 or similar character is used. The modifier letter turned comma, , is often deemed proper in academic circles. It is called ‘okina in Hawaiian, fakaua in Tongan, eta in Tahitian and so on. Very often, however, Tongan excepted, it is ignored. Although some English speakers pronounce glottal stops in Hawaiian words, the vast majority do not. Even in the name Hawai‘i, 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'. 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, the Võro glottal stop acts mostly as a grammatical marker rather than 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 .

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.

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