Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) is a

phonation The term phonation has slightly different meanings depending on the subfield of phonetics. Among some phoneticians, ''phonation'' is the process by which the vocal folds produce certain sounds through quasi-periodic vibration. This is the defini ...

in which the

vocal folds In humans, vocal cords, also known as vocal folds or voice reeds, are folds of throat tissues that are key in creating sounds through vocalization. The size of vocal cords affects the pitch of voice. Open when breathing and vibrating for speech ...

vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like sound. A simple breathy phonation, (not actually a

fricative consonant A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...

, as a literal reading of the IPA chart would suggest), can sometimes be heard as an

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor ''phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in ''s ...

of English between vowels, such as in the word ''behind'', for some speakers. In the context of the

Indo-Aryan languages The Indo-Aryan languages (or sometimes Indic languages) are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily ...

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

and

Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been de ...

and comparative

Indo-European studies Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical pro ...

, breathy consonants are often called ''voiced aspirated'', as in the Hindi and Sanskrit stops normally denoted ''bh, dh, ḍh, jh,'' and ''gh'' and the reconstructed

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...

phoneme ''gʷʰ''. , as breathy voice is a different type of phonation from aspiration. However, breathy and aspirated stops are acoustically similar in that in both cases there is a delay in the onset of full voicing. In the history of several languages, like

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

and some

varieties of Chinese Chinese, also known as Sinitic, is a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family consisting of hundreds of local varieties, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast of main ...

, breathy stops have developed into aspirated stops.

Classification and terminology

There is some confusion as to the nature of murmured phonation. The

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

(IPA) and authors such as

Peter Ladefoged Peter Nielsen Ladefoged ( , ; 17 September 1925 – 24 January 2006) was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book ''A Course ...

equate phonemically contrastive murmur with ''breathy voice'' in which the vocal folds are held with lower tension (and farther apart) than in modal voice, with a concomitant increase in airflow and slower vibration of the glottis. In that model, murmur is a point in a continuum of glottal aperture between modal voice and breath phonation (voicelessness). Others, such as Laver, Catford, Trask and the authors of the

Voice Quality Symbols Voice Quality Symbols (VoQS) are a set of phonetic symbols used to transcribe disordered speech for what in speech pathology is known as "voice quality". This phrase is usually synonymous with phonation in phonetics, but in speech pathology encom ...

(VoQS), equate murmur with ''whispery voice'' in which the vocal folds or, at least, the anterior part of the vocal folds vibrates, as in modal voice, but the arytenoid cartilages are held apart to allow a large turbulent airflow between them. In that model, murmur is a compound phonation of approximately modal voice plus whisper. It is possible that the realization of murmur varies among individuals or languages. The IPA uses the term "breathy voice", but VoQS uses the term "whispery voice". Both accept the term "murmur", popularised by Ladefoged.

Transcription

A stop with breathy release or a breathy nasal is transcribed in the

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...

as etc. or as etc. Breathy vowels are most often written etc. Indication of breathy voice by using subscript diaeresis was approved in or before June 1976 by members of the council of

International Phonetic Association The International Phonetic Association (IPA; French: ', ''API'') is an organization that promotes the scientific study of phonetics and the various practical applications of that science. The IPA's major contribution to phonetics is the Interna ...

. In VoQS, the notation is used for whispery voice (or murmur), and is used for breathy voice. Some authors, such as Laver, suggest the alternative transcription (rather than IPA ) as the correct analysis of

Gujarati Gujarati may refer to: * something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India * Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat * Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them * Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub ...

, but it could be confused with the replacement of modal voicing in voiced segments with whispered phonation, conventionally transcribed with the diacritic .

Methods of production

There are several ways to produce breathy sounds such as . One is to hold the vocal folds apart, so that they are lax as they are for , but to increase the volume of airflow so that they vibrate loosely. A second is to bring the vocal folds closer together along their entire length than in voiceless , but not as close as in modally voiced sounds such as vowels. This results in an airflow intermediate between and vowels, and is the case with English intervocalic /h/. A third is to constrict the glottis, but separate the

arytenoid cartilage The arytenoid cartilages () are a pair of small three-sided pyramids which form part of the larynx. They are the site of attachment of the vocal cords. Each is pyramidal or ladle-shaped and has three surfaces, a base, and an apex. The arytenoid ...

s that control one end. This results in the vocal folds being drawn together for voicing in the back, but separated to allow the passage of large volumes of air in the front. This is the situation with Hindi. The distinction between the latter two of these realizations, vocal folds somewhat separated along their length (''breathy voice'') and vocal folds together with the arytenoids making an opening (''whispery voice''), is phonetically relevant in

White Hmong Hmong / Mong (; RPA: ''Hmoob,'' ; Nyiakeng Puachue: ; Pahawh: , ) is a dialect continuum of the West Hmongic branch of the Hmongic languages spoken by the Hmong people of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Hainan, northern Vietnam, Thailand, ...

(''Hmong Daw'').

Phonological property

A number of languages use breathy voicing in a phonologically contrastive way. Many

, such as

, typically have a four-way contrast among plosives and affricates (voiced, breathy, tenuis, aspirated) and a two-way contrast among nasals (voiced, breathy). The

Nguni languages The Nguni languages are a group of closely related Bantu languages spoken in southern Africa by the Nguni peoples. Nguni languages include Xhosa, Zulu, Ndebele (sometimes referred to as "Northern Ndebele"), and Swazi. The appellation "Nguni" d ...

within the southern branch of the

Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...

, including

Phuthi Phuthi (''Síphùthì'') is a Nguni Bantu language spoken in southern Lesotho and areas in South Africa adjacent to the same border. The closest substantial living relative of Phuthi is Swati (or ''Siswati''), spoken in Eswatini and the Mp ...

Xhosa Xhosa may refer to: * Xhosa people, a nation, and ethnic group, who live in south-central and southeasterly region of South Africa * Xhosa language, one of the 11 official languages of South Africa, principally spoken by the Xhosa people See als ...

, Zulu, Southern Ndebele and

Swazi Swazi may refer to: * Swazi people, a people of southeastern Africa * Swazi language * Eswatini Eswatini ( ; ss, eSwatini ), officially the Kingdom of Eswatini and formerly named Swaziland ( ; officially renamed in 2018), is a landlocked coun ...

, also have contrastive breathy voice. In the case of Xhosa, there is a four-way contrast analogous to Indic in oral clicks, and similarly a two-way contrast among nasal clicks, but a three-way contrast among plosives and affricates (breathy, aspirated, and

ejective In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some l ...

), and two-way contrasts among fricatives (voiceless and breathy) and nasals (voiced and breathy). In some Bantu languages, historically breathy stops have been phonetically devoiced, but the four-way contrast in the system has been retained. In all five of the southeastern Bantu languages named, the breathy stops (even if they are realised phonetically as devoiced aspirates) have a marked tone-lowering (or tone-depressing) effect on the following

tautosyllabic Two or more segments are tautosyllabic (with each other) if they occur in the same syllable. For instance, the English word "cat", , is monosyllabic and so its three phonemes , and are tautosyllabic. They can also be described as sharing a 't ...

vowels. For this reason, such stop consonants are frequently referred to in the local linguistic literature as 'depressor' stops. Swazi, and to a greater extent Phuthi, display good evidence that breathy voicing can be used as a morphological property independent of any consonant voicing value. For example, in both languages, the standard morphological mechanism for achieving the

morphosyntactic In linguistics, morphology () is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morph ...

copula is to simply execute the noun prefix syllable as breathy (or 'depressed'). In

Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...

, vowels after the

stressed syllable In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...

can be pronounced with breathy voice.

is unusual in contrasting breathy vowels and consonants: 'twelve', 'outside', 'burden'. Tsumkwe Juǀ'hoan makes the following rare distinctions : fall, land (of a bird etc.); walk; herb species; and /n, ʱoaᵑ/ greedy person; /n, oaʱᵑ/ cat.Dickens, Patick (1994) English-Ju/'hoan Ju/'hoan-English dictionary , 9783927620551 Breathy stops in Punjabi lost their phonation, merging with voiceless and voiced stops in various positions, and a system of high and low tones developed in syllables that formerly had these sounds. Breathy voice can also be observed in place of

debuccalized Debuccalization or deoralization is a sound change or alternation in which an oral consonant loses its original place of articulation and moves it to the glottis (usually , , or ). The pronunciation of a consonant as is sometimes called aspira ...

coda in some dialects of colloquial Spanish, e.g. for '' ''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Breathy Voice Phonation

Classification and terminology

Transcription

Methods of production

Phonological property

See also

References