Glottal stop

The glottal stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʔ⟩.

In English, the glottal stop is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh!. For most United States English speakers, a glottal stop is used as an allophone of /t/ between a vowel and a syllabic "n", as in button or mountain, except when talking slowly. In British English, the glottal stop is most familiar in the Cockney pronunciation of "butter" as "bu'er".

Features

Features of the glottal stop:

Glottal stop (letter)

The sign ⟨ʔ⟩ is called "glottal stop," and it is a letter in some extended Latin alphabets of several languages of Canada. It is not part of the basic Latin alphabet or Classical Latin alphabet. Several phonetic transcription schemes, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), use versions of glottal stop.

Significance

It typically represents a glottal stop sound.

Similar letters

Since ⟨ʔ⟩ is not in the basic Latin alphabet, typing it can be inconvenient or impossible. Where ⟨ʔ⟩ is not available, it is sometimes replaced by a question mark ⟨?⟩, which is also its official representation in the transcription scheme, SAMPA. In Skwomesh or Squamish, the character may be replaced by the number ⟨7⟩.

Other likely replacements are signs similar to ⟨'⟩ (apostrophe), since they represent glottal stops in other orthographies, such as the sign ʻ (ʻokina) in Hawaiian.

In Unicode, uppercase Latin glottal stop and IPA glottal stop are two different characters (respectively): ⟨Ɂ⟩ and ⟨ʔ⟩. The first is slightly wider than the second. Lowercase and superscript versions are also distinguished:⟨ɂ⟩ ⟨ˀ⟩.