The voiceless epiglottal or pharyngeal trill, or voiceless epiglottal fricative,^[1] is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʜ⟩, a small capital version of the Latin letter h, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is H\.

Quick Facts Voiceless pharyngeal trill, ʜ ...

Voiceless pharyngeal trill (voiceless epiglottal fricative)
ʜ
IPA Number	172
Audio sample
source · help
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ʜ
Unicode (hex)	U+029C
X-SAMPA	H\
Braille
Image

Close

The glyph is homoglyphic with the lowercase Cyrillic letter En (н).

Features of the voiceless epiglottal trill/fricative:

• Its manner of articulation is trill, which means it is produced by directing air over an articulator so that it vibrates.
• Its place of articulation is epiglottal, which means it is articulated with the aryepiglottic folds against the epiglottis.
• Its phonation is voiceless, which means it is produced without vibrations of the vocal cords. In some languages the vocal cords are actively separated, so it is always voiceless; in others the cords are lax, so that it may take on the voicing of adjacent sounds.
• It is an oral consonant, which means air is allowed to escape through the mouth only.
• It is a central consonant, which means it is produced by directing the airstream along the center of the tongue, rather than to the sides.
• The airstream mechanism is pulmonic, which means it is articulated by pushing air solely with the intercostal muscles and abdominal muscles, as in most sounds.

• Index of phonetics articles