GLOTTAL

Glottal sounds are in the minority in articulatory terms, since they do not involve the tongue: instead, the articulators are the vocal folds, which constitute a place of articulation as well as having a crucial role in voicing. English has two glottal sounds. The first is allophonic, namely the glottal stop, [ʔ], which appears as an intervocalic realization of /t/ in many accents, as in butter. The glottal stop is technically voiceless, though in fact it could hardly be anything else, since when the vocal folds are pressed together to completely obstruct the airstream, as must be the case for a stop sound, air cannot simultaneously be passing through to cause vibration. The second, the voiceless glottal fricative [h], is a phoneme in its own right.