Glottalic and velaric airstreams

Airstream mechanisms

Airstream mechanism is the term we use to describe the means by which air is moved out of or into the vocal tract. So far, in almost all the sounds we have looked at, the airstream is pulmonic and egressive. Every spoken language uses this mechanism. There are two other important airstream mechanisms in the world’s languages, and it is possible to illustrate them from spoken English. They are:

velaric airstream, where there is a complete closure of the back of the tongue against the velum (sometimes uvula), with another closure somewhere forward of that, making a cavity between the two closures

glottalic airstream, where the glottis is closed and the larynx is raised to compress, or lowered to rarefy, air trapped between the glottal closure and a constriction higher up in the vocal tract

We will explore and illustrate these two airstreams with material from English.

While sounds that are made with the velaric and glottalic airstream mechanisms can be observed in English, very little is known about the uses to which these sounds are put, what their distribution in speech is, and who is likely to use them. This is an area for much further work. It is a challenging area, because velarically and glottalically initiated sounds are not easy to elicit from speakers (e.g. in eliciting word lists), but in many varieties of spoken English they are common in spontaneous, conversational speech.