Glottal

Finally, we come to the glottal fricative, [h], which does not occur at all in some varieties of English. This is usually classed as a fricative on the grounds that its friction noise is generated at the glottis. Because of this, its quality is very different depending on what follows. If you say the words ‘heat, heart, hoot’, and isolate the initial fricative, you will hear very different qualities, which are determined by the quality of the vowel that follows. This is because although there is friction being generated at the glottis, the rest of the vocal tract above the glottis (the supralaryngeal tract) excites and amplifies some parts of the friction more than others. One commonly suggested analysis of [h] is that it is a period of voicelessness superimposed on a vowel, so that it might also be transcribed as e.g.  . Between vowels, voiced glottal friction is common. Examples of this are to be found in the words ‘ahead, ahoy, behold’. One analysis of this sound is to treat it as a period of voicing with glottal friction, or breathy voice. So we might transcribe ‘ahead’ as (with a voiced glottal fricative) or (with breathy voicing and a vowel).

[h] is usually counted as a fricative of English, though phonologically it patterns more closely with /w/ and /j/, which are also limited in distribution to syllable-initial position. /h/ also has phonological similarities with /w/ and /ð/: for instance, it occurs at the start of many function words (including some related ones: ‘where’, ‘there’, ‘here’), and can be dropped from the start of words (e.g. will/’ll, them/’em, her/’er). Connected to this, the distribution of [h] is related to stress: it appears in stressed syllables, but not in unstressed ones – compare ‘he likes it’ [hi 1 laiks It] with ‘does he like it?’ . ‘Dropping one’s h’s’ in unstressed syllables is normal for even conservative speakers.