Breathy voice

Breathy voice is produced by incomplete closure along the length of the vocal folds as they vibrate. There is an opening which allows air to flow out during voicing, generating both voicing and some friction noise. Breathy voice impressionistically is ‘soft’, and tends to be quieter than modal (‘normal’) voicing. In English-speaking cultures it is often associated with female speakers, and is often exploited in e.g. adverts for chocolate or cosmetics. Many people (of either gender) regularly use a slightly breathy setting in their ordinary speech.

Breathy voice is transcribed with the diacritic [*], which sits below the symbol, e.g. [mm*m], ‘mhm’.

English [h] is often produced as a stretch of breathy voicing: for example, in the phrase ‘a happy holiday’, the words ‘happy’ and ‘holiday’ have voicing at their start, accompanied with breathiness. We could transcribe this as, or alternatively – and equivalently – as.