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.
There is no symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet dedicated for this sound, but the extIPA pre-/post-creak diacritic can be used. One source has used the transcription , and another has used ; however, neither of the articulations described by these transcriptions are physically possible, and both sources quote , who use the (ext)IPA wildcard in their transcription.
Features Features of a creaky-voiced glottal approximant:
Its phonation is creaky-voiced.
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. +LanguageWordIPAMeaningNotesGimi'many'The voiced equivalent of a glottal stop ; and correspond to and in neighboring languages. One source analyses the pair instead as and .Koreguajeu’chape’e 'oil'Non-contrastive allophone of .Siona'path'Allophone of typically realized as creak on surrounding vowels.
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