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IPA – number	146
IPA – text	h
IPA – image
Entity	h
X-SAMPA	h
Kirshenbaum	h
Sound sample (help·info)

The voiceless glottal transition, commonly called a "fricative", is a type of sound used in some spoken languages which often behaves like a consonant, but sometimes behaves more like a vowel, or is indeterminate in its behavior. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is h, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is h. People lacking this sound in their native language often have difficulty trying to produce it. Notably, speakers of French.

Features of the "voiceless glottal fricative":

• Its phonation type is voiceless, which means that the air passes through the vocal cords without causing them to vibrate.
• It is a transitional state of the glottis. It has no manner of articulation other than its phonation type. Because there is no other constriction to produce friction in the vocal tract, most phoneticians no longer consider [h] to be a fricative. However, the term "fricative" is generally retained for historical reasons.
• It has no fricative place of articulation. The term glottal only refers to the nature of its phonation, and does not describe the location of the stricture nor the turbulence. All consonants except for the glottals, and all vowels, have an individual place of articulation in addition to the state of the glottis. As with all other consonants, surrounding vowels influence the pronunciation [h], and [h] has sometimes been presented as a voiceless vowel, having the place of articulation of these surrounding vowels.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth.
• Because it is pronounced in the throat, without a component in the mouth, the central/lateral dichotomy does not apply.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic egressive, which means it is articulated by pushing air out of the lungs and through the vocal tract, rather than from the glottis or the mouth.

• Voiced glottal fricative, a common allophone in numerous languages
• List of phonetics topics