Aspiration (linguistics)

Aspirated
◌ʰ
Encoding
Entity (decimal)	ʰ
Unicode (hex)	U+02B0

In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most Indian and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive, while in Arabic and Persian, all stops are aspirated.

To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say spin [spɪn] and then pin [pʰɪn]. One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with pin that one does not get with spin.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), aspirated consonants are written using the symbols for voiceless consonants followed by the aspiration modifier letter ⟨◌ʰ⟩, a superscript form of the symbol for the voiceless glottal fricative ⟨h⟩. For instance, ⟨p⟩ represents the voiceless bilabial stop, and ⟨pʰ⟩ represents the aspirated bilabial stop.

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