A simple breathy phonation, [ɦ] (not actually a fricative consonant, as a literal reading of the IPA chart would suggest), can sometimes be heard as an allophone of English /h/ between vowels, such as in the word behind, for some speakers.
In the context of the Indo-Aryan languages like Sanskrit and Hindi and comparative Indo-European studies, breathy consonants are often called voiced aspirated, as in the Hindi and Sanskrit stops normally denoted bh, dh, ḍh, jh, and gh and the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European phonemes bʰ,dʰ,ǵʰ,gʰ,gʷʰ.
Indication of breathy voice by using subscript diaeresis was approved in or before June 1976 by members of the council of International Phonetic Association.
A second is to bring the vocal folds closer together along their entire length than in voiceless [h], but not as close as in modally voiced sounds such as vowels.
This results in the vocal folds being drawn together for voicing in the back, but separated to allow the passage of large volumes of air in the front.
In all five of the southeastern Bantu languages named, the breathy stops (even if they are realised phonetically as devoiced aspirates) have a marked tone-lowering (or tone-depressing) effect on the following tautosyllabic vowels.
For example, in both languages, the standard morphological mechanism for achieving the morphosyntactic copula is to simply execute the noun prefix syllable as breathy (or 'depressed').
Breathy voice can also be observed in place of debuccalized coda /s/ in some dialects of colloquial Spanish, e.g. [ˈtoðoɦ lo ˈθiɦneh som ˈblaŋkoh] for todos los cisnes son blancos.