The glottal stop

[sirred]

This may well be one of those ultra-basic things taught in Linguistics 1, but are there any (I don't want to say rules) general characteristics of languages that have the glottal stop as a phoneme? Just to make sure I am not misusing the word, what I think phoneme means is a contrasting sound, like how in English pat and cat are different words because of the first sound /p^h/ and /k^h/. Please don't jump down my throat if I did not analyze the sounds correctly, it isn't the point of my question.

[Miekko]

Not that I know of, but re: your sig, Urho Kekkonen was president of Finland from 1956 to 1982. In a country that generally was acknowledged to be democratic.

A search at the universals archive may help, but I didn't find anything particularly interesting, most of the stuff there were sort of not very obvious, and very few were of the form "glottal stop -> X" (there were disjunctions and "X->glottal stop goes everywhere" kinds of things), things like this was the closest I found:
IF stops are the only final word margin, THEN they will be glottal stops.

[jal]

Just to make sure I am not misusing the word, what I think phoneme means is a contrasting sound

Correct, that's a phoneme.

like how in English pat and cat are different words because of the first sound /p^h/ and /k^h/.

Well, either (in this case preferable, since we're talking phonemes) you say /p/ and /k/, because those are the phonemes, or you say [p^h] and [k^h], as phones (since aspiration is not phonemic in English).


JAL

[Soap]

Not that I know of, but re: your sig, Urho Kekkonen was president of Finland from 1956 to 1982. In a country that generally was acknowledged to be democratic.

A search at the universals archive may help, but I didn't find anything particularly interesting, most of the stuff there were sort of not very obvious, and very few were of the form "glottal stop -> X" (there were disjunctions and "X->glottal stop goes everywhere" kinds of things), things like this was the closest I found:
IF stops are the only final word margin, THEN they will be glottal stops.

I couldnt find that on the site. By final word margin, do you mean the last consonant in a word? Inuit violates that, since it has the only permissible final consonants in a word as -q -k -t (and maybe -p, though I cant find a word that ends in it) and no glottal stop. I suppose it could be interpreted as saying "if all words must end in a stop (i.e. no vowels), that stop must be a glottal stop." But does such a language even exist? A language where all words must end in a glottal stop?

edit: ah, I found it. Direct linking doesnt seem to work though.

[Astraios]

Inuit violates that, since it has the only permissible final consonants in a word as -q -k -t (and maybe -p, though I cant find a word that ends in it) and no glottal stop.

Isn't the [ergative?] suffix something like -up?

[Noriega]

Inuit violates that, since it has the only permissible final consonants in a word as -q -k -t (and maybe -p, though I cant find a word that ends in it) and no glottal stop.

Isn't the [ergative?] suffix something like -up?

Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_grammar#Subjects_2
E.g. Piitaup paliisi takupauk? - Does Peter see the policeman?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_phonology says
"There are also some restrictions on final consonants, where only voiceless plosives (/p t k q/) can occur unless consonant sandhi has occurred."