Aspirated consonant
In phonetics,
aspiration is the strong burst of air 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, in some other languages, notably most Indian and East Asian Languages, the difference is contrastive. 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
pin and then
bin. One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with
pin that one does not get with
bin. In most dialects of English, the initial consonant is aspirated in
pin and unaspirated in
bin. The diacritic for aspiration in the International Phonetic Alphabet is a superscript "h", 〈◌ʰ〉. In Unicode, it is encoded at U+02B0 ʰ modifier letter small h. Unaspirated consonants are not normally marked explicitly, but there is a diacritic for
non-aspiration in the Extensions to the IPA, the superscript equal sign, 〈◌˭〉.