Glottal stop

The **glottal stop** (or **glottal plosive**) is a type of consonant. The letter for this sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet is . The X-SAMPA symbol for this sound is <samp>⟨?⟩</samp>. In English, this sound is found in a few accents.

One example is the break in "uh**-**oh".

## Features

Features of the glottal stop:

- It has no phonation. This means that it is not a voiced or voiceless sound. This is because there is no air flow through the glottis when the sound is being made.

## Writing

When many languages, such as Arabic, are Romanized (which means they are written with the Latin alphabet instead of their usual writing system), the glottal stop is written with the apostrophe  or the symbol ʾ. This is where the IPA letter  comes from. In many Polynesian languages that use the Latin alphabet, the glottal stop is written with a rotated apostrophe, . This letter is called _‘okina_ in Hawaiian and Samoan. In Malay the glottal stop is written with the letter  (at the end of words). In Võro and Maltese, it is written with .

Other writing systems also have letters for the glottal stop. For example, the Hebrew alphabet uses the letter aleph . Cyrillic has the letter palochka . This letter is used in several Caucasian languages. Modern Latin alphabets for some Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus use the letter heng ('Ꜧ ꜧ'). In Tundra Nenets, it is written with the letters apostrophe  and double apostrophe . In Japanese, glottal stops occur at the end of interjections of surprise or anger and are written with .

When most Philippine languages are written, the glottal stop is not written all the time. Usually, a word that begins with a vowel (for example, Tagalog , "dog") is always pronounced with a glottal stop before that vowel. (This also happens in Modern German and Hausa.) This glottal stop is not written. Some orthographies (or ways of writing words) use a hyphen instead of the reverse apostrophe if the glottal stop is in the middle of the word (e.g. Tagalog , "love"; or Visayan _gabi-i_, "night"). If it is at the end of a word, the last vowel is written with a circumflex accent (known as the _pakupyâ_) if the last vowel is stressed and there is a glottal stop in the final vowel (for example, _basâ_, "wet"). If the stress is on the penultimate, or second-to-last, syllable, then a grave accent (known as the _paiwà_) is used (for example, _batà_, "child").

Some Canadian indigenous languages, especially some of the Salishan languages, use the letter ʔ itself as part of their writing systems. In some of them, there are uppercase and lowercase letters for the glottal stop: Ɂ and ɂ. The number 7 or question mark is sometimes used instead of ʔ. Some languages, such as Squamish, use this instead of ʔ. SENĆOŦEN uses the comma  to write the glottal stop. However, this is optional in SENĆOŦEN.

In 2015, two women challenged the government of the Northwest Territories. They wanted to use the ʔ character in their daughters' names: Sahaiʔa, a Chipewyan name, and Sakaeʔah, a Slavey name. The government told them that the identity documents the government uses could not have the letter ʔ on them. Because of this, the women instead used hyphens in their daughters' names. After this, they continued to challenge the government.

In the Crow language, the glottal stop is written as a question mark: ?. The only time the glottal stop is used in Crow is as a question marker morpheme, at the end of a sentence. (A question marker makes a sentence into a question.)

## Examples

|Language|Word|IPA|Meaning|Notes|||||
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
|Abkhaz|/ai||'no'|See Abkhaz phonology.|||||
|Adyghe|/'ė||'arm/hand'||||||
|Arabic|Modern Standard|/'aġani||'songs'|See Arabic phonology, Hamza.||||
|Levantine and Egyptian|/šaa||'apartment'|Levantine and Egyptian dialects. Corresponds to  or  in other dialects.|||||
|Fasi and Tlemcenian|/'al||'he said'|Fasi and Tlemcenian dialects. Corresponds to  or  in other dialects.|||||
|Azeri|||'husband'||||||
|bantawa|||'drinking water'||||||
|Bikol|||'new'||||||
|Bulgarian|/ŭ-ŭ||'nope'||||||
|Burmese|/rcī mya:||'rivers'||||||
|Cebuano|||'to grow'||||||
|Chamorro|||'shark'||||||
|Ingush|/||'three'||||||
|Chinese|Cantonese|/||'love'|See Cantonese phonology.||||
|Wu|/yi ji le||'superb'||||||
|Cook Islands Māori|||'one'||||||
|Czech|||'to use'|See Czech phonology.|||||
|colspan="2"|Dahalo|||'water'|see Dahalo phonology||||
|Danish|||'hand'|Depends on the speaker's accent. Sometimes, it can be pronounced as laryngealisation of the sound before it instead. See Danish phonology.|||||
|Dutch|||'to confirm'|See Dutch phonology.|||||
|English|RP|||'uh-oh'|||||
|American|||||||||
|Australian|||'cat'|Allophone of . See glottalization and English phonology.|||||
|GA|||||||||
|Estuary|||||||||
|Cockney|||||||||
|Scottish|||||||||
|Northern England|||'the'||||||
|RP and GA|_bu**tt**on_||'button'||||||
|Finnish|||'rainy morning'|See Finnish phonology.|||||
|German|Northern|||'civil servant'|See Standard German phonology.||||
|Guaraní|||'Guaraní'|This only happens between vowels.|||||
|Hawaiian|||'black'|See Hawaiian phonology.|||||
|Hebrew|/ma'amar||'article'|See Modern Hebrew phonology.|||||
|Icelandic|||'but'|Only used according to emphasis, never occurring in minimal pairs.|||||
|Iloko|||'bland tasting'||||||
|Indonesian|||'meatball'|Allophone of  or  in the syllable coda, or the end of a syllable.|||||
|Japanese|Kagoshima|gakkō||'school'|Written with 'っ' in Hiragana, and with 'ッ' in Katakana.||||
|Javanese|||'child'|Allophone of  in morpheme-final position.|||||
|colspan="2"|Jedek|||'left side'|||||
|Kabardian|/'ė||'arm/hand'||||||
|Kagayanen|||'floor'||||||
|Khasi|||'cloud'||||||
|Khmer|/||'rights'|See Khmer phonology|||||
|Korean|/il||'one'|In free variation with no glottal stop. (This means that someone can either pronounce it with a glottal stop or without one, and both ways of pronouncing it are correct.) Occurs only at the start of a word.|||||
|rowspan="3"|Malay|Standard|||'no'|Allophone of final  in the syllable coda (or the end of a syllable). It is pronounced before consonants and at end of a word. In other parts of a word,  is only pronounced in loanwords from Arabic. See Malay phonology.|||
|Kelantan-Pattani|rowspan="2"||rowspan="2"||rowspan="2"|ˌ'to tie'|rowspan="2"|Allophone of final  in the syllable coda (or the end of a syllable). It is pronounced before consonants and at the end of a word. See Kelantan-Pattani Malay and Terengganu Malay.|
|Terengganu|||||||||
|Maltese|||'cat'||||||
|Māori|Taranaki, Whanganui|||'woman'|||||
|Minangkabau|||'you'|Sometimes written without an apostrophe.|||||
|Mutsun|||'black gooseberry'||||||
|Mingrelian|/?oropha||'love'||||||
|Nahuatl|||'father'|Often not written.|||||
|Nez Perce|||'black bear'||||||
|Nheengatu|||'sloth'|Transcription (or absence thereof) varies.|||||
|Okinawan|/utu||'sound'||||||
|Persian|/ma'ni||'meaning'|See Persian phonology.|||||
|Polish|era|[ʔɛra]|'era'|See Polish phonology.|||||
|Pirahã|||'parent'||||||
|Portuguese|Vernacular Brazilian|||'yeah right'|Marginal sound. Does not occur after or before a consonant. In Brazilian casual speech, there is at least one –vowel length–pitch accent minimal pair (triply unusual, the ideophones short  vs. long ). See Portuguese phonology.||||
|Some speakers|||'to the class'||||||
|Rotuman|||'to box'||||||
|Samoan|||'sickness/illness'||||||
|Sardinian|Some dialects of Barbagia|||'a little'|Intervocalic allophone of .||||
|Some dialects of Sarrabus|||'the moon'||||||
|Serbo-Croatian|||'and then'|Optionally inserted between vowels across word boundaries. See Serbo-Croatian phonology.|||||
|Seri|||'I'||||||
|colspan="2"|Somali|||'calamity'|occurs before all vowels. However, it is only written in the middle or at the end of a word. See Somali phonology.||||
|Spanish|Nicaraguan|||'higher'|Marginal sound or allophone of  between vowels in different words. Does not occur after or before a consonant. See Spanish phonology.||||
|Yucateco|||'four years'||||||
|Tagalog|||'yes'|See Tagalog phonology.|||||
|Tahitian|||'pig'||||||
|Thai|/'ā||'uncle/aunt' (father's younger sibling)||||||
|Tongan|||'stand'||||||
|Tundra Nenets|/vy'||'tundra'||||||
|Vietnamese|||'sultry'|In free variation with no glottal stop. (Free variation means that the word can be pronounced with or without a glottal stop.) See Vietnamese phonology.|||||
|Võro|||'dogs'|"q" is the plural marker in Võro. (A plural marker is a morpheme which makes words into plurals. For example, _maa_, "land"; _maaq_, "lands".)|||||
|Wagiman|||'to eat' (perfect)||||||
|Welayta|7írTi||'wet'||||||
|Wallisian|||'life'||||||

## Infobox (ipa)

- **above**: Glottal stop
- **ipa symbol**: ʔ
- **ipa number**: 113
- **decimal**: 660
- **x-sampa**: ?
- **kirshenbaum**: ?
- **braille**: ;