During the standardization of Basque in the 1970s, the compromise was reached that h would be accepted if it were the first consonant in a syllable. Hence, herri ("people") and etorri ("to come") were accepted instead of erri (Biscayan) and ethorri (Souletin). Speakers could pronounce the h or not. For the dialects lacking the aspiration, this meant a complication added to the standardized spelling. Other systems
As a phonetic symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), it is used mainly for the so-called aspirations (fricative or trills), and variations of the plain letter are used to represent two sounds: the lowercase form ⟨h⟩ represents the voiceless glottal fricative, and the small capital form ⟨ʜ⟩ represents the voiceless epiglottal fricative (or trill). With a bar, minuscule ⟨ħ⟩ is used for a voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Specific to the IPA, a hooked ⟨ɦ⟩ is used for a voiced glottal fricative, and a superscript ⟨ʰ⟩ is used to represent aspiration. Related characters
Descendants and related characters in the Latin alphabet
H with diacritics: Ĥ ĥ Ȟ ȟ Ħ ħ Ḩ ḩ Ⱨ ⱨ ẖ ẖ Ḥ ḥ Ḣ ḣ Ḧ ḧ Ḫ ḫ ꞕ Ꜧ ꜧ
IPA-specific symbols related to H: ʜ ɦ ʰ ʱ ɥ ᶣ ɧ
Superscript IPA symbols related to H: 𐞖 𐞕
ꟸ: Modifier letter capital H with stroke is used in VoQS to represent faucalized voice.
That is, when the phoneme /h/ precedes a vowel, /h/ may be realized as a voiceless version of the subsequent vowel. For example the word ⟨hit⟩, /hɪt/ is realized as [ɪ̥ɪt]. H is the eighth most frequently used letter in the English language (after S, N, I, O, A, T, and E), with a frequency of about 4.2% in words. When h is placed after certain other consonants, it modifies their pronunciation in various ways, e.g. for ch, gh, ph, sh, and th. Other languages
In the German language, the name of the letter is pronounced /haː/. Following a vowel, it often silently indicates that the vowel is long: In the word erhöhen (heighten), the second ⟨h⟩ is mute for most speakers outside of Switzerland. In 1901, a spelling reform eliminated the silent ⟨h⟩ in nearly all instances of ⟨th⟩ in native German words such as thun (to do) or Thür (door). It has been left unchanged in words derived from Greek, such as Theater (theater) and Thron (throne), which continue to be spelled with ⟨th⟩ even after the last German spelling reform. In Spanish and Portuguese, ⟨h⟩ ("hache" in Spanish, pronounced [atʃe], or agá in Portuguese, pronounced [aˈɣa] or [ɐˈɡa]) is a silent letter with no pronunciation, as in hijo [ˈixo] (son) and húngaro [ˈũɡaɾu] (Hungarian). The spelling reflects an earlier pronunciation of the sound /h/.