The /h/ Sound

The /h/ sound is called the “voiceless glottal fricative,” which means that the sound is made with the motion of your vocal chords but is not voiced. Connect with The English Language Club 🙋 1 to 1 Classes with Colin Munro 🔴 The next 100 sign ups get my course for FREE!!! 🤗 Join the Club: :// 📱 Get the App: 💻 Website: 🐦 Twitter: 📸 IG: 😆 Discord Server: The /h/ sound is made through the mouth and is Aspirated, which means air comes out of your mouth as you say the sound and you do not vibrate your vocal chords but it is defined by the position of your vocal chords, because it is a fricative. Fricatives are sounds which are made by bringing two parts of your mouth or throat very close together and pushing the air through them. In this case, that’s your vocal chords. The /h/ sound doesn’t have a specific mouth shape as it normally takes the shape from the following sounds. To produce the /h/ sound, constrict your throat and breathe out through your mouth. The shape of your mouth doesn’t matter as much. It will probably just be whatever shape you’ll be making to make the next sound. This video is part of our series on phonetics and pronunciation for learners of English as a foreign language. Phonetics is the science of pronunciation. It can be helpful for people learning English because one of the most difficult things about the language is the spelling and pronunciation. English is not very phonetic and as a result the same letters are often pronounced in many different ways in different words. The IPA helps by providing a way to write words as they are pronounced. The normal alphabet only has 26 characters but there are 44 different sounds that are used to pronounce words. As well as that, most word in English originate from other languages like Greek, Latin and French to name just a few and in many cases the the language of origin influences how the word is pronounced. The IPA provides a symbol (phoneme) for each sound so the correct pronunciation can be written or printed in dictionaries. This video along with the others in our pronunciation series helps language learners to hear the correct pronunciation and also to know how to produce the sound of each phoneme.