Voiceless glottal fricative
| Voiceless glottal fricative | |
|---|---|
| h | |
| IPA number | 146 |
| Encoding | |
| Entity (decimal) | h |
| Unicode (hex) | U+0068 |
| X-SAMPA | h |
| Kirshenbaum | h |
| Braille |  |
| Sound | |
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The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless glottal transition, and sometimes called the aspirate, is a type of sound used in some spoken languages that patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant phonologically, but often lacks the usual phonetic characteristics of a consonant. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨h⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is h.
Although [h] has been described as a voiceless vowel because in many languages, it lacks the place and manner of articulation of a prototypical consonant, it also lacks the height and backness of a prototypical vowel:
[h and ɦ] have been described as voiceless or breathy voiced counterparts of the vowels that follow them [but] the shape of the vocal tract […] is often simply that of the surrounding sounds. […] Accordingly, in such cases it is more appropriate to regard h and ɦ as segments that have only a laryngeal specification, and are unmarked for all other features. There are other languages [such as Hebrew and Arabic] which show a more definite displacement of the formant frequencies for h, suggesting it has a [glottal] constriction associated with its production.
The Lamé language contrasts voiceless and voiced glottal fricatives.
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