Breathy Voice

Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, soughing, or susurration) 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 (not actually a fricative, as a literal reading of the IPA chart would suggest) can sometimes be heard as an allophone of English /h/ between vowels, e.g. in the word behind, for some speakers. A stop with breathy-voiced release (symbolized either as, etc. or as, etc.) is like aspiration in that it delays the onset of full voicing. Breathy-voiced vowels are written, etc.

In the context of the Indo-Aryan languages (e.g. Sanskrit and Hindi) and comparative Indo-European studies, breathy-voiced consonants are often called voiced aspirated, as in e.g. the Hindi and Sanskrit stops normally denoted bh, dh, ḍh, jh, and gh and the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European phoneme gʷh. From an articulatory perspective this terminology is incorrect, as breathy voice is a different type of phonation from aspiration. However, breathy-voiced and aspirated stops are acoustically similar in that in both cases there is an audible period of breathiness following the stop, and in the history of various languages (e.g. Ancient Greek, Mandarin Chinese), breathy-voiced stops have subsequently developed into voiceless aspirated stops.