Voiceless glottal fricative

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.

Features

Features of the voiceless glottal fricative:

• 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, such as Cockney, the [h] sound is muted.

In other languages

Non-native speakers of English, whose native languages either lack an /h/ or use the letter "h" for different sounds, may substitute /x/ for /h/ or not pronounce it at all when speaking English.

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/.

See also

• List of phonetics topics