Unreleased stop

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An unreleased stop or unreleased plosive is a plosive consonant without an audible release burst. That is, the oral tract is blocked to pronounce the consonant, and there is no audible indication of when that occlusion ends. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, unreleased consonants are denoted with an upper-right corner diacritic above the consonant letter: [p̚], [t̚], [k̚].

In English, a plosive is unreleased before a homorganic nasal, as in catnip [ˈkæt ̚nɪp]. Commonly the first in a cluster of plosives, as in apt or doctor, is also said to be unreleased in the speech of most English speakers. However, although these may be transcribed [ˈæp̚t] and [ˈdɒk ̚tɹ̩], these are not actually unreleased. Rather, the first stop is released during the hold of the second, so that they overlap; in this way the first release is inaudible.^[1]

In languages such as Cantonese, Catalan, Korean, Min Nan (Taiwanese), Malay and Thai, final stops are not released: mak [mak̚]. Unreleased final stops lack aspiration, neutralising the aspiration distinction between stop pairs such as p/b, k/g, t/d etc in languages such as Cantonese.

Some languages which are reported to have unreleased final stops turn out to have short voiceless nasal releases instead. Vietnamese is an example.

Released plosives, on the other hand, are not normally indicated. If a final plosive is aspirated, the aspiration symbol [ʰ] is sufficient to indicate the release. Otherwise, the 'unaspirated' diacritic from the Extended IPA may be employed for this: apt [æp̚t⁼].