Voiceless glottal fricative
| IPA – text | h |
| IPA – image | Missing image Xsampa-h.png Image:Xsampa-h.png |
| entity | h |
| X-SAMPA | h |
| Kirshenbaum | h |
| Missing image Loudspeaker.png Sound Sound sample? | |
|---|---|
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.
| Contents |
Features
Features of the voiceless glottal "fricative":
- Its phonation type is voiceless, which means that the air passes through the vocal cords without causing them to vibrate.
- It is a transitional state of the glottis. It has no manner of articulation other than its phonation type. Because there is no other constriction to produce friction in the vocal tract, most phoneticians no longer consider h to be a fricative. However, the term "fricative" is generally retained for historical reasons.
- It has no place of articulation. The term glottal means it is articulated by the vocal folds, but this is the nature of its phonation rather than a separate articulation. All consonants except for the glottals, and all vowels, have an individual place of articulation in addition to the state of the glottis.
- 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
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.
Finnish
The Finnish phoneme 'h' represents [h], but it may voiced or emphasized with a secondary velar articulation. For example, höyry "steam" has a [h], but in pahka "gnarl" a velar articulation is added for emphasis by some speakers.
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
- Voiced glottal fricative, a common allophone in numerous languages
- List of phonetics topics