In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies the release of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, put your hand or a lit candle in front of your mouth, and say top and then stop. You should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with top that you do not get with stop. The t in top is aspirated; in stop it is unaspirated. Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... In phonetics, an obstruent is a consonant sound formed by obstructing the airway. ...

The diacritic for aspiration in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript aitch, [ʰ]. Unaspirated consonants are not normally marked explicitly, but there is a diacritic for non-aspiraton in the Extended IPA, the superscript equal sign, [⁼]. The International Phonetic Alphabet. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ...

English voiceless stops are aspirated when they begin a stressed syllable, as in pen, ten, Ken, but this is not distinctive. That is, these consonants have unaspirated variants in other positions, such as word-finally or after [s], as in spun, stun, skunk. In many languages, such as Cantonese, Hindi, Icelandic, Korean, Mandarin, Thai, and Ancient Greek, [p⁼ t⁼ k⁼] etc. and [pʰ tʰ kʰ] etc. are different phonemes altogether. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Phoneticians define phonation as use of the laryngeal system to generate an audible source of acoustic energy, i. ... Metre (American spelling: meter) is the rhythm or regular sound-pattern of poetry. ... This article is on all of the Yue dialects. ... Hindi (हिन्दी) is a language spoken mainly in North and Central India. ... Mandarin   listen?(Traditional: 北方話, Simplified: 北方话, Hanyu Pinyin: BÄ›ifānghuà, lit. ... Ancient Greek refers to the stage in the history of the Greek language corresponding to Classical Antiquity, which normally applies on two ancient periods of Greek history: Archaic and Classic Greece. ... In oral language, a phoneme is the theoretical basic unit of sound that can be used to distinguish words or morphemes; in sign language, it is a similarly basic unit of hand shape, motion, position, or facial expression. ...

Alemannic German dialects have unaspirated [p⁼ t⁼ k⁼] as well as aspirated [pʰ tʰ kʰ]; the latter series are usually viewed as consonant clusters. In Danish and most southern varieties of German, the "lenis" consonants transcribed for historical reasons as <b d g> are distinguished them from their "fortis" counterparts <p t k> mainly in their lack of aspiration. Alemannic (Alemannisch) belongs to the Upper German branch of the Germanic language family. ... In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. ...

Icelandic has pre-aspirated [ʰp ʰt ʰk]; some scholars interpret these as consonant clusters as well.

The aspiration symbol is sometimes used with voiced stops, such as [dʰ]. However, such "voiced aspiration", also known as breathy voice or murmur, is less ambiguously transcribed with dedicated diacritics, either [d̤] or [dʱ]. (Some linguists restrict the subscript diacritic [  ̤] to sonorants, such as vowels and nasal consonants, which are murmured throughout their duration, and use the superscript [ʱ] for the murmured release of obstruents.) Breathy voice or murmured voice is a phonation in which the vocal folds are vibrating as in normal voicing, but the glottal closure is incomplete, so that the voicing is somewhat inefficient and air continues to leak between the vocal folds throughout the vibration cycle with audible friction noise. ... In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a member of a class of speech sounds that are continuants produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract. ... Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-07-18, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... A nasal consonant is produced when the velum—that fleshy part of the palate near the back—is lowered, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. ...

See also:

• Voice onset time
• List of phonetic topics