Glottal stop


 * This article is about the sound. For the letter, see glottal stop (letter).

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; for example, the break separating the syllables of the interjection uh-oh. While this segment is not a phoneme in English, it is present in nearly all dialects of English as an allophone of /t/. Some foreign language learning texts (e.g. Arabic) spend considerable space explaining this sound (in non-technical terms) to English speakers, although most English speakers make this consonant easily and daily.

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 letter. In many Polynesian languages which use the Latin alphabet, however, the glottal stop is written with a reversed apostrophe, <‘> (called ‘okina in Hawaiian), which, confusingly, is also used to transcribe the ayin Arabic and is the source of the IPA character for the voiced pharyngeal fricative <>.

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.