Glottalization - Glottal Replacement

Glottal Replacement

When a phoneme is completely substituted by a glottal stop, one speaks of glottaling or glottal replacement. This is, for instance, very common in Cockney and Estuary English. In these dialects, the glottal stop is an allophone of /p/, /t/, and /k/ word-finally and when preceded by a stressed vowel and followed by an unstressed vowel (this also includes syllabic /l/ /m/ and /n/). 'water' can be pronounced – the glottal stop has omitted the 't' sound. Other examples include "city", "bottle", "Britain", "seniority" .

Glottal replacement also occurs in Indonesian, where syllable final /k/ is produced as a glottal stop. In Hawaiian, the glottal stop is reconstructed to have come from other Proto-Polynesian consonants. The following table displays the shift /k/ → /ʔ/ as well as the shift /t/ → /k/.

Glottal replacement is not purely a feature of consonants. Yanesha' has three vowel qualities (/a/, /e/, and /o/) that have phonemic contrasts between short, long, and "laryngeal" or glottalized forms. While the latter generally consists of creaky phonation, there is some allophony involved. In pre-final contexts, a variation occurs (especially before voiced consonants) ranging from creaky phonation throughout the vowel to a sequence of a vowel, glottal stop, and a slightly rearticulated vowel: /maˀˈnʲoʐ/ ('deer') → .