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'Glottal consonants' are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricatives, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, the glottal stop at least behaves as a typical consonant in languages such as Tsou.
Glottal consonants in the International Phonetic Alphabet:

IPA	Description	Example
		Language	Orthography	IPA	Meaning
Xsampa-questionmark.png	voiceless glottal stop	Hawaiian	‘okina	[]	‘okina
Xsampa-hslash.png	breathy voiced glottal "fricative"	Czech	Praha	[]	Prague
Xsampa-h.png	voiceless glottal "fricative"	English	hat	[]	hat

The "fricatives" are not true fricatives. This is a historical usage of the word. They instead represent transitional states of the glottis (phonation) without a specific place of articulation. is a voiceless transition. is a breathy-voiced transition, and could be transcribed as .
The glottal stop occurs in many languages. Often all vocalic onsets are preceded by a glottal stop, for example in German. The Hawaiian language writes the glottal stop as an opening single quote '‘'. Some alphabets use diacritics for the glottal stop, such as hamza <'ء'> in the Arabic alphabet; in many languages of Mesoamerica, the Latin letter is used for glottal stop.
Because the glottis is necessarily closed for the glottal stop, it cannot be voiced.

Contents

See also

See also

★ Glottalic consonant

★ Place of articulation

★ List of phonetics topics