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glottal consonant
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consonant produced using the glottis as the primary articulation
A glottal consonant is a speech sound made by controlling airflow at the glottis, which is the opening between your vocal cords in the throat. These sounds matter because they appear in many languages around the world and help speakers distinguish between different words and meanings.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
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Encyclopedic overview
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Glottal consonants are consonants using the glottis as their primary articulation. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the glottal fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have, while some do not consider them to be consonants at all. However, glottal consonants behave as typical consonants in many languages. For example, in Literary Arabic, most words are formed from a root C-C-C consisting of three consonants, which are inserted into templates such as /CaːCiC/ or /maCCuːC/. The glottal consonants /h/ and /ʔ/ can occupy any of the three root consonant slots, just like "normal" consonants such as /k/ or /n/.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “glottal consonant” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.