In this video we are going to have a look at a very special sound that we sometimes hear in English: the glottal stop, also called glottal plosive.

This is a sound that is used in some regional accents in English, e.g. the Cockney accent from London, but it is also used more commonly in other words where it usually replaces the sound /t/. This is then called T-Glottalization.

This special sound is formed in the glottis – the space between the vocal cords that are situated in our throat. If you want to locate your vocal cords and glottis, simply cough or swallow and you can feel your glottis closing and opening. The glottal stop is an unvoiced plosive sound, so we close our vocal cords to restrict the airflow and then suddenly open them to release the airflow. It might be difficult to hear the glottal stop on its own, so best listen to it within a word (I show you several examples in the video). It makes the adjacent vowel sound a lot sharper. Very often the glottal stop replaced the sound /t/ when it is followed by a labial consonant, for example in the words ‘network’, ‘that one’ or ‘hate mail.’