Creaky-voiced glottal approximant

See also: Breathy-voiced glottal approximant

A creaky-voiced glottal approximant is a consonant sound in some languages. It involves tension in the glottis and diminution of airflow, compared to surrounding vowels, but not full occlusion. It is a common phonetic realization of a glottal stop, especially intervocalically, but is only rarely contrastive except when gemination is involved.

Creaky-voiced glottal approximant
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One source has used the transcription ⟨ʔ̬⟩,^[1] and another has used ⟨ʔ̰⟩;^[2] however, both are inaccurate, and the sources quote Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:76–77), who use the IPA wildcard ⟨*⟩ in their transcription.

Features

Features of a creaky-voiced glottal approximant:

• Its manner of articulation is approximant, which means it is produced by narrowing the vocal tract at the place of articulation, but not enough to produce a turbulent airstream.
• Its phonation is creaky-voiced.
• It is an oral consonant, which means that air is not allowed to escape through the nose.
• Because the sound is not produced with airflow over the tongue, the central–lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• Its airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air only with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

Occurrence

It is an intervocalic allophone of a glottal stop in many languages; in languages with gemination, it may only be a stop intervocalically when geminate.^[3]

Language	Word	IPA	Meaning	Notes
Gimi	hagok	/ha*oʔ/	'many'	The voiced equivalent of a glottal stop /ʔ/; /*/ and /ʔ/ correspond to /ɡ/ and /k/ in neighboring languages.[4] One source analyses the pair instead as /ʔ/ and /ʔː/.[5]

See also

• Voiced glottal fricative