Glottalization

Glottalization is a phonetic and phonological phenomenon in which the glottis—the opening between the vocal folds—plays a central role in the articulation or phonation of speech sounds. It can involve the use of a glottal stop as a consonant, or the imposition of glottalized or creaky voice on vowels or other segments.

Consonantal glottalization occurs when a stop or other consonant is realized as a glottal stop [ʔ], rather than with the usual oral constriction. This is common in many languages for codas or in rapid speech. In English dialects, for example, word-final t is frequently replaced by a glottal stop in casual speech, and words such as cat or city may be realized with a glottal closure rather than a pronounced t.

Vocalic glottalization refers to vowels produced with creaky voice (also called laryngealization) or other reduced voicing. This can be phonation type in some languages and is sometimes marked in transcription with diacritics such as ̰. Creaky voice is cross-linguistically attested and can affect the perceived quality of a vowel without creating a separate vowel segment.

Phonological status and distribution vary by language. Glottal stops are phonemic in several languages (for example, Hawaiian and many other Polynesian languages), where the glottal stop is a distinct consonant. In other languages, glottalization is an allophonic or phonetic variation conditioned by position, speech rate, or syntactic context. Glottalization often interacts with syllable structure, assimilation, and stress, and can reflect historical changes in consonant and vowel systems.