Saltillo (linguistics)

In Mexican linguistics, the saltillo (Spanish, meaning "little skip") is a glottal stop consonant (IPA: [ʔ]).

In a number of other Nahuan languages, the sound cognate to the glottal stop of Classical Nahuatl is [h], and the term saltillo is applied to it for historical reasons.

A glottal stop exists as a phoneme in many other indigenous languages of the Americas and its presence or absence can distinguish words.

The lowercase saltillo letter is used in Miꞌkmaq of Canada, Izere of Nigeria, Rapa Nui of Chile and in at least one Southeast Asian language, Central Sinama of the Philippines and Malaysia.

In the latter it represents both the glottal stop and the centralized vowel [ə] and derives from the historical use of hamza for those sounds in Arabic script.