What Is the Sound in the Middle of Uh-Oh? A Gap That Counts as a Consonant

The vocal folds in the larynx can be brought together to stop the airflow entirely, and releasing them produces a small burst of sound. That closure and release is articulated exactly the way other stop consonants are, except that the closure happens at the larynx rather than at the lips, the teeth or the roof of the mouth. English speakers produce it between the two halves of the expression of dismay, at the start of a word beginning with a vowel when it is emphasised, and before a vowel at the beginning of a phrase. It is also what happens when a speaker cuts off a word abruptly, and what is used to separate two identical vowels across a word boundary.

It appears in ordinary speech more than most speakers realise:

• •Replacing the t in many accents, including London, Glasgow and much of England
• •Between two vowels at a word boundary to keep them apart
• •Before an emphasised word beginning with a vowel
• •In the middle of expressions of dismay or negation
• •Reinforcing a final consonant, which is widespread and rarely noticed
• •When a speaker stops abruptly in the middle of a word

Replacing the sound at the end or in the middle of a word is among the most heavily stigmatised features of British speech, and the attitude towards it is a good illustration of how linguistic prejudice works. The feature has been denounced in newspapers and by educators for over a century as lazy, sloppy and evidence of declining standards. It is none of those things, since producing it requires the same articulatory precision as any other consonant and since it has been present in regional English for centuries and in many other languages permanently. What it is, is associated with working-class and urban speech, and the strength of the objection tracks that association rather than anything about the sound itself.

The symbol used for this sound in phonetic transcription resembles a question mark without the dot, and its appearance in a transcription tells a reader something specific. Phonetic notation exists because ordinary spelling is an unreliable guide to pronunciation in most languages and useless for comparison between them, so a system with one symbol per sound was developed from the 1880s and has been refined since. Writing this particular sound explicitly matters because it is frequently present and almost never spelled, so a transcription that includes it records something the written form conceals entirely. That is a general point about the notation, which makes visible exactly the features of speech that writing systems ignore.

Several languages treat it as an ordinary consonant with its own letter and its own contrastive role. Arabic has a letter for it and words differ by its presence or absence. Hawaiian marks it with a turned apostrophe and distinguishes words by it, which is why the written form of Hawaiian names contains that mark and why omitting it changes the word. Maltese, Hebrew, several Polynesian languages and many indigenous languages of the Americas use it contrastively. German inserts it before initial vowels systematically, which is part of why German sounds clipped to English ears. In those languages calling it a lazy omission would be incoherent, since nothing is being omitted.

Closing and releasing the vocal folds produces a stop consonant articulated at the larynx rather than in the mouth, and English speakers use it constantly without noticing. It replaces the t sound in many British accents, which has been denounced as lazy for a century despite requiring the same precision as any consonant. Arabic, Hawaiian, Maltese and many other languages treat it as a full contrastive consonant with its own letter.