The Arabic letter Hamza. I hear it often at work but I don’t understand what a glottal stop is
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Discussing the nature of any particular Arabic letter is very difficult because of the wide variety of dialects and lack of standardization of spoken Arabic (let’s not even get started with ﻉ).
But let’s talk glottal stop – a sound you’ve almost certainly been making your whole life if you’re a native English speaker, just without necessarily realizing it. A glottal stop is, as you might expect, a sudden stoppage of the air flowing through the glottis – basically, you shut down your vocal cords for a moment. Though arguments can be made that it should be its own thing, it mostly functions like a consonant.
When most speakers of North American and British (and other?) dialects of English say the word “kitten”, they don’t actually pronounce the t’s. You don’t say “kit-ten” most of the time; instead, you say “ki-“, then you make some sort of weird non-noise, and then you say “-en”. This can happen in other spots with double t’s as well, like “button” or “better”. Some dialects of English will do it to single t’s with vowels to either side like in “city”, or even to a t at the end of a word like “cat”. Notice that this is all happening with t, which is the most likely spot for this in English ([here’s a Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-glottalization)). This phenomenon is more common when speaking quickly.
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