Glottis

The space between the vocal cords is called the glottis. As the vocal cords vibrate, the resulting vibration produces a "buzzing" quality to the speech, called voice or voicing.

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Sounds production involving only the glottis is called glottal. English has a voiceless glottal fricative spelt "h". In many accents of English the glottal stop (made by pressing the folds together) is used as a variant allophone of the phoneme (and in some dialects, occasionally of and ); in some languages, this sound is a phoneme of its own.

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Skilled players of the Australian didgeridoo restrict their glottal opening in order to produce the full range of timbres available on the instrument.

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(See "Acoustics: The vocal tract and the sound of a didgeridoo", by Tarnopolsky et al. in Nature 436, 39 (7 July 2005)).

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The vibration produced is an essential component of voiced consonants as well as vowels. If the vocal folds are drawn apart, air flows between them causing no vibration, as in the production of voiceless consonants.

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• Voiced consonants include
• Voiceless consonants include

See also:

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Phonation

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Voiceless glottal fricative: The voiceless glottal "fricative" is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is h....

Glottal stop: The glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in many spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?. The glottal stop is the sound made when the vocal cords are pressed ...

Allophone: :This article is about the sense of "allophone" used in linguistics. For other senses, see allophone (disambiguation)....