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Jahani, Carina
« The Glottal Plosive: A Phoneme in Spoken Modern Persian or not? », in : Éva Ágnes Csató ; Bo Isaksson and Carina Jahani, eds., Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic. London - New York, Routledge-Curzon, 2005, pp. 79-96.
In this paper, Carina Jahani addresses a problematic issue in the phonology of Persian, the case of glottal plosive (hamze), and aims to see if the glottal plosive has the chance to remain on the phonemic chart of spoken Persian. This research is based on her fieldwork, and the phonological environment of the glottal plosive, along with structural, semantic, situational, and speaker-related factors have been taken into account. The findings show that the glottal plosive does exist as a phoneme in spoken Persian, and among all the factors mentioned above, the phonological environment is of a great importance, as the postconsonantal prevocalic position (C-V) is the environment where the glottal plosive is most likely to be retained. Other phonological environments are V-:V, V1-V1 and e-â. Such findings, along with the fact that this sound occurs in non-predictable environments, make the writer believe that hamze is a phoneme in spoken Persian.

