English In English, occurs as a single-letter
grapheme (being either
silent or representing the
voiceless glottal fricative and in various
digraphs: • representing , , , or • being silent or representing , , , or • representing • representing • representing • representing or • representing or The letter is silent in a
syllable rime, as in
ah,
ohm,
dahlia,
cheetah, and
pooh-poohed, as well as in certain other words (mostly of French origin) such as
hour,
honest,
herb, and
vehicle (in
American but not
British English). Initial is often not pronounced in the
weak form of some
function words, including
had,
has,
have,
he,
her,
him,
his, and in some varieties of English (including most regional dialects of England and Wales), it is often
omitted in all words. It was formerly common for
an rather than
a to be used as the indefinite article before a word beginning with in an
unstressed syllable, as in "an historian", but the use of
a is now more usual. In English, the pronunciation of as /h/ can be analyzed as a voiceless vowel. That is, when the phoneme /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as a voiceless version of the subsequent vowel. For example, the word , /hɪt/ is realized as [ɪ̥ɪt]. H is the
eighth most frequently used letter in the English language (after
S,
N,
I,
O,
A,
T, and
E), with a frequency of about 6.1% in words.
Other languages In
German, following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word ('heighten'), the second is mute for most speakers outside of Switzerland. In 1901, a
spelling reform eliminated the silent in nearly all instances of in native German words such as
thun ('to do') or
Thür ('door'). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as ('theater') and ('throne'), which continue to be spelled with even after the last German spelling reform. In
Spanish and
Portuguese, is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in ('son') and ('Hungarian'). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound . In words where the is derived from a Latin , it is still sometimes pronounced with the value in some regions of
Andalusia,
Extremadura,
Canarias,
Cantabria, and the Americas. Some words beginning with or , such as and , were given an initial to avoid confusion between their initial semivowels and the consonants and . This is because and used to be considered variants of and respectively. also appears in the digraph , which represents in Spanish and northern Portugal, and in varieties that have merged both sounds (the latter originally represented by instead), such as most of the Portuguese language and some Spanish dialects, prominently
Chilean Spanish.
French orthography classifies words that begin with this letter in two ways, one of which can affect the pronunciation, even though it is a silent letter either way. The
H muet, or "mute" , is considered as though the letter were not there at all. For example, the singular definite
article le or
la, which is
elided to
l' before a vowel, elides before an
H muet followed by a vowel. For example,
le + hébergement becomes ''l'hébergement'' ('the accommodation'). The other kind of is called
h aspiré ("
aspirated ", though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and does not allow elision or
liaison. For example, in le homard'' ('the lobster') the article
le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an
H muet come from Latin (
honneur,
homme) or from Greek through Latin (
hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an
H aspiré come from Germanic (
harpe,
hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (
harem,
hamac,
haricot); in some cases, an orthographic was added to disambiguate the and semivowel pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters and :
huit (from
uit, ultimately from Latin
octo),
huître (from
uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin
ostrea). In Italian, has no
phonological value. Its most important uses are in the
digraphs 'ch' and 'gh' , as well as to differentiate the spellings of certain short words that are
homophones, for example, some
present tense forms of the verb
avere ('to have') (such as
hanno, 'they have', vs.
anno, 'year'), and in short
interjections (
oh,
ehi). Some languages, including
Czech,
Slovak,
Hungarian,
Finnish, and
Estonian, use as a
breathy voiced glottal fricative , often as an allophone of otherwise voiceless in a voiced environment. In
Hungarian, the letter represents a phoneme with four allophones: before vowels, between two vowels, after
front vowels, and word-finally after
back vowels. It can also be a silent word-finally after back vowels. It is when geminated. In archaic spelling, the digraph represents (as in the name
Széchenyi) and (as in
pech, which is pronounced ); in certain environments it breaks palatalization of a consonant, as in the name
Beöthy, which is pronounced (without the intervening
h, the name
Beöty could be pronounced ); and finally, it acts as a silent component of a digraph, as in the name
Vargha, pronounced . In
Ukrainian and
Belarusian, when written in the Latin alphabet, is also commonly used for , which is otherwise written with the Cyrillic letter . In
Irish, is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words; however, placed after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates the
lenition of that consonant; began to replace the original form of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, after the introduction of typewriters. In most dialects of Polish, both and the digraph always represent . In
Basque, during the 20th century, it was not used in the orthography of the Basque dialects in Spain but it marked an aspiration in the North-Eastern dialects. During the
standardization of Basque in the 1970s, a compromise was reached that
h would be accepted if it were the first consonant in a syllable. Hence,
herri ("people") and
etorri ("to come") were accepted instead of
erri (
Biscayan) and
ethorri (
Souletin).
Other systems As a phonetic symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), it is used mainly for the so-called aspirations (fricative or trills), and variations of the plain letter are used to represent two sounds: the lowercase form represents the
voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form represents the
voiceless epiglottal fricative (or trill). With a bar, minuscule is used for a
voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Specific to the IPA, a hooked is used for a
voiced glottal fricative, and a superscript is used to represent
aspiration. ==Other uses==