In producing an ejective, the stylohyoid muscle and digastric muscle contract, causing the hyoid bone and the connected glottis to rise, and the forward articulation (at the velum in the case of [kʼ]) is held, raising air pressure greatly in the mouth so when the oral articulators separate, there is a dramatic burst of air.
[4] Ejective fricatives are rare for presumably the same reason: with the air escaping from the mouth while the pressure is being raised, like inflating a leaky bicycle tire, it is harder to distinguish the resulting sound as salient as a [kʼ].
[a] Ejectives are found today in Ossetian and some Armenian dialects only because of influence of the nearby Northeast Caucasian and/or Kartvelian language families.
Nguni languages, such as Zulu have an implosive b alongside a series of allophonically ejective stops.
Non-contrastively, ejectives are found in many varieties of British English, usually replacing word-final fortis plosives in utterance-final or emphatic contexts.
Tlingit is an extreme case, with ejective alveolar, lateral, velar, and uvular fricatives, [sʼ], [ɬʼ], [xʼ], [xʷʼ], [χʼ], [χʷʼ]; it may be the only language with the last type.
[citation needed] Amharic is interpreted by many as having an ejective fricative [sʼ], at least historically, but it has been also analyzed as now being a sociolinguistic variant (Takkele Taddese 1992).
A similar historical sound change also occurred in Veinakh and Lezgic in the Caucasus, and it has been postulated by the glottalic theory for Indo-European.
When sonorants are transcribed with an apostrophe in the literature as if they were ejective, they actually involve a different airstream mechanism: they are glottalized consonants and vowels whose glottalization partially or fully interrupts an otherwise normal voiced pulmonic airstream, somewhat like English uh-uh (either vocalic or nasal) pronounced as a single sound.
Often the constriction of the larynx causes it to rise in the vocal tract, but this is individual variation and not the initiator of the airflow.
A reversed apostrophe is sometimes used to represent light aspiration, as in Armenian linguistics ⟨pʼ tʼ kʼ⟩; this usage is obsolete in the IPA.
In other transcription traditions (such as many romanisations of Russian, where it is transliterating the soft sign), the apostrophe represents palatalization: ⟨pʼ⟩ = IPA ⟨pʲ⟩.
In Zulu and Xhosa, whose ejection is variable between speakers, plain consonant letters are used: p t k ts tsh kr for /pʼ tʼ kʼ tsʼ tʃʼ kxʼ/.