Breathy voice

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Breathy voice or murmured voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise. A breathy-voiced phonation [ɦ] (not actually a fricative, as a literal reading of the IPA chart would suggest) can be heard as an allophone of English /h/ between vowels, eg. in behind. A stop with breathy-voiced release (symbolised either as [bʱ], [dʱ], [gʱ], etc. or as [b̤], [d̤], [g̈], etc.) is like aspiration in that it delays the onset of full voicing. This is the phonation of the Hindi "voiced aspirated stops" bh, dh, jh, gh.

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

Breathy voice

See also