Final-obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic
phonological process occurring in languages such as
Catalan
Catalan may refer to:
Catalonia
From, or related to Catalonia:
* Catalan language, a Romance language
* Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia
Places
* 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
,
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
,
Dutch,
Breton,
Russian,
Polish,
Lithuanian,
Turkish, and
Wolof. In such languages,
voiced obstruent
An obstruent () is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well as ...
s in final position (at the end of a word) become voiceless before voiceless consonants and in
pausa
In linguistics, pausa (Latin for 'break', from Greek παῦσις, ''pausis'' 'stopping, ceasing') is the hiatus between prosodic declination units. The concept is somewhat broad, as it is primarily used to refer to allophones that occur in ce ...
. The process can be written as *C
voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound producti ...
/sub> → Cvoice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound producti ...
/sub>/__#.
Languages with final-obstruent devoicing
Germanic languages
Most modern continental West Germanic languages
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages (the others being the North Germanic and the extinct East Germanic languages). The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into ...
developed final devoicing, the earliest evidence appearing in Old Dutch around the 9th or 10th century.
* Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gr ...
* Dutch, also Old
Old or OLD may refer to:
Places
*Old, Baranya, Hungary
*Old, Northamptonshire, England
* Old Street station, a railway and tube station in London (station code OLD)
*OLD, IATA code for Old Town Municipal Airport and Seaplane Base, Old Town, M ...
and Middle Dutch
Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects whose ancestor was Old Dutch. It was spoken and written between 1150 and 1500. Until the advent of Modern Dutch after 1500 or c. 1550, there was no overarc ...
* (High) German, also Middle High German
Middle High German (MHG; german: Mittelhochdeutsch (Mhd.)) is the term for the form of German spoken in the High Middle Ages. It is conventionally dated between 1050 and 1350, developing from Old High German and into Early New High German. Hig ...
* Gothic
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
(for fricatives)
* Limburgish
Limburgish ( li, Limburgs or ; nl, Limburgs ; german: Limburgisch ; french: Limbourgeois ), also called Limburgan, Limburgian, or Limburgic, is a West Germanic language spoken in the Dutch and Belgian provinces of Limburg and in the neig ...
* Low German
:
:
:
:
:
(70,000)
(30,000)
(8,000)
, familycolor = Indo-European
, fam2 = Germanic
, fam3 = West Germanic
, fam4 = North Sea Germanic
, ancestor = Old Saxon
, ancestor2 = Middle ...
, also Middle Low German
Middle Low German or Middle Saxon (autonym: ''Sassisch'', i.e. " Saxon", Standard High German: ', Modern Dutch: ') is a developmental stage of Low German. It developed from the Old Saxon language in the Middle Ages and has been documented i ...
* Luxembourgish
Luxembourgish ( ; also ''Luxemburgish'', ''Luxembourgian'', ''Letzebu(e)rgesch''; Luxembourgish: ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide.
As a standard form of th ...
(only when not resyllabified)
* Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...
(for fricatives, inconsistently for )
* West Frisian. In contrast, North Frisian (and some Low German dialects in North Frisia that have a Frisian substratum) does not have final devoicing.
In contrast to other continental West Germanic languages, (Eastern)-Yiddish
Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...
notably does not alter final voiced sounds; this appears to be a later reversal, most probably under Slavic influence. In its earliest recorded example ( Yiddish, written evidence), it has final-obstruent devoicing (טַק "tak" instead of "tag" for day.)
Of the North Germanic languages
The North Germanic languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages—a sub-family of the Indo-European languages—along with the West Germanic languages and the extinct East Germanic languages. The language group is also ...
, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish (the last of which has no voiced obstruents) do not have final devoicing. As in Danish, Icelandic stops are voiceless, but it has voiced fricatives which may also occur word-finally.
Gothic (an East Germanic language) also developed final devoicing independently.
Romance languages
Among the Romance languages
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
, word-final devoicing is common in the Gallo-Romance languages
The Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages includes in the narrowest sense the Langues d'oïl and Franco-Provençal. However, other definitions are far broader, variously encompassing the Occitano-Romance, Gallo-Italic, and Rhaeto-Rom ...
, some of which tend to exhibit strong Frankish influence (itself the ancestor of Old Dutch, above).
* Catalan
Catalan may refer to:
Catalonia
From, or related to Catalonia:
* Catalan language, a Romance language
* Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia
Places
* 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
* Old French
Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
and Middle French
Middle French (french: moyen français) is a historical division of the French language that covers the period from the 14th to the 16th century. It is a period of transition during which:
* the French language became clearly distinguished from t ...
(preserved in certain Modern French inflections such as vs. , when applying liaison vs. , but now often grammaticalized)
* Meridional French
* Friulian
* Lombard
* Occitan
* Romansh
Notes:
* Standard French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
(by final schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...
losses, see above for notes) and Romanian
Romanian may refer to:
*anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania
** Romanians, an ethnic group
**Romanian language, a Romance language
***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language
**Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
do ''not'' have final devoicing, however, varieties of French with substrates of Occitan and Catalan (and other final devoicing languages) do have it.
* Other Romance languages such as Italian rarely have words with final voiced consonants for different reasons in their phonological histories, but borrowings from English into Italian that have a voiced final consonant (such as ''weekend'') are not devoiced.
* Portuguese merges and in word-final position ( and are homophones) but has a few words ending with voiced stops like (although some dialects feature an epenthetic vowel after the final consonant).
Slavic languages
Most Slavic languages
The Slavic languages, also known as the Slavonic languages, are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, spoken during the ...
exhibit final devoicing, but notably standard (Štokavian
Shtokavian or Štokavian (; sh-Latn, štokavski / sh-Cyrl, italics=no, штокавски, ) is the prestige dialect of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language and the basis of its Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin standards. It ...
) Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...
and Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
do not.
* Belarusian
* Bulgarian
* Czech
* Macedonian
Macedonian most often refers to someone or something from or related to Macedonia.
Macedonian(s) may specifically refer to:
People Modern
* Macedonians (ethnic group), a nation and a South Slavic ethnic group primarily associated with North Ma ...
* Polish
* Russian
* Rusyn
Rusyn may refer to:
* Rusyn people, an East Slavic people
** Pannonian Rusyn people, a branch of Rusyn people
** Lemkos, a branch of Rusyn (or Ukrainian) people
** Boykos, a branch of Rusyn (or Ukrainian) people
* Rusyn language, an East Slavic l ...
* Serbo-Croatian
Serbo-Croatian () – also called Serbo-Croat (), Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia an ...
(Kajkavian
Kajkavian (Kajkavian noun: ''kajkavščina''; Shtokavian adjective: ''kajkavski'' , noun: ''kajkavica'' or ''kajkavština'' ) is a South Slavic regiolect or language spoken primarily by Croats in much of Central Croatia, Gorski Kotar and no ...
dialects)
* Slovak
* Slovene
* Sorbian
Other Indo-European languages
* Albanian – certain dialects, notably the dialects of certain areas of the Berati and Korça counties
* Arbëresh
* Breton
* Latgalian
* Lithuanian
* Yaghnobi
Non-Indo-European languages
* Azerbaijani
Azerbaijani may refer to:
* Something of, or related to Azerbaijan
* Azerbaijanis
* Azerbaijani language
See also
* Azerbaijan (disambiguation)
* Azeri (disambiguation)
* Azerbaijani cuisine
* Culture of Azerbaijan
The culture of Azerbaijan ...
(half-voiced in Iranian Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan or Azarbaijan ( fa, آذربایجان, ''Āzarbāijān'' ; az-Arab, آذربایجان, ''Āzerbāyjān'' ), also known as Iranian Azerbaijan, is a historical region in northwestern Iran that borders Iraq, Turkey, the Nakhchivan ...
, but unexplained in Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan (, ; az, Azərbaycan ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, , also sometimes officially called the Azerbaijan Republic is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a part of th ...
proper)
* Georgian (for stops)
* Indonesian (for stops)
* Kalmyk (for stops)
* Khmer
* Korean (nuanced; see Korean phonology)
* Livonian (fully devoiced or half-voiced)
* Lao
* Malaysian (for stops)
* Maltese
* Modern Javanese (for stops)
* Mongolian
* Thai
* Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin (,Laurie Bauer, 2007, ''The Linguistics Student’s Handbook'', Edinburgh ; Tok Pisin ), often referred to by English speakers as "New Guinea Pidgin" or simply Pidgin, is a creole language spoken throughout Papua New Guinea. It is an ...
* Turkish (for stops, partially)
Notes:
* Hungarian, which lies geographically between Germanic- and Slavic- speaking areas, does ''not'' have it.
Examples
Dutch and Afrikaans
In Dutch and Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gr ...
, terminal devoicing results in homophones such as 'hard' and 'heart' as well as differences in consonant sounds between the singular and plural forms of nouns, for example (Dutch) and (Afrikaans) for 'wave–waves'.
The history of the devoicing phenomenon within the West Germanic languages
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages (the others being the North Germanic and the extinct East Germanic languages). The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into ...
is not entirely clear, but the discovery of a runic inscription
A runic inscription is an inscription made in one of the various runic alphabets. They generally contained practical information or memorials instead of magic or mythic stories. The body of runic inscriptions falls into the three categories of ...
from the early fifth century suggests that this terminal devoicing originated in Frankish. Of the old West Germanic languages, Old Dutch, a descendant of Frankish, is the earliest to show any kind of devoicing, and final devoicing also occurred in Frankish-influenced Old French
Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intel ...
.
Amelands Amelands is a dialect of Dutch, spoken on the Wadden Sea island of Ameland. It is especially closely related to the Midslands dialect, spoken in the middle segment of the neighboring island of Terschelling. Amelands, which has about 2,900 speakers, ...
, spoken on the Wadden Sea
The Wadden Sea ( nl, Waddenzee ; german: Wattenmeer; nds, Wattensee or ; da, Vadehavet; fy, Waadsee, longname=yes; frr, di Heef) is an intertidal zone in the southeastern part of the North Sea. It lies between the coast of northwestern conti ...
island of Ameland
Ameland (; West Frisian: It Amelân) is a municipality and one of the West Frisian Islands off the north coast of the Netherlands. It consists mostly of sand dunes. It is the third major island of the West Frisians. It neighbours islands Ter ...
, is the only Dutch dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
that does not feature final-obstruent devoicing.
English
Standard varieties of English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
do not have phonological final-obstruent devoicing of the type that neutralizes phonemic contrasts; thus pairs like ''bad'' and ''bat'' are distinct in all major accents of English. Nevertheless, voiced obstruents are devoiced to some extent in final position in English, especially when phrase-final or when followed by a voiceless consonant (for example, ''bad cat'' ). Additionally, the voiced alveolar stop /d/ is regularly devoiced in African-American Vernacular English
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE, ), also referred to as Black (Vernacular) English, Black English Vernacular, or occasionally Ebonics (a colloquial, controversial term), is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urb ...
(AAVE).
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th ...
had final devoicing of , although the spelling did not distinguish and . It can be inferred from the modern pronunciation of ''half'' with a voiceless , from an originally voiced fricative in Proto-Germanic (preserved in German and Gothic ). There was also final devoicing of to finally, evidenced by spellings like alongside .
German
Final-obstruents devoicing occurs in the varieties from Northern Germany. The German contrast between homorganic
In phonetics, a homorganic consonant (from ''homo-'' "same" and ''organ'' "(speech) organ") is a consonant sound that is articulated in the same place of articulation as another. For example, , and are homorganic consonants of one another sinc ...
obstruents is more properly described as a fortis and lenis
In linguistics, fortis and lenis ( and ; Latin for "strong" and "weak"), sometimes identified with tense and lax, are pronunciations of consonants with relatively greater and lesser energy, respectively. English has fortis consonants, such as th ...
opposition than an opposition of voiceless and voiced sounds. Therefore, the term ''devoicing'' may be misleading, since voice is only an optional feature of German lenis obstruents. By contrast, the German term for the phenomenon, '' Auslautverhärtung'' ("final-sound hardening"), refers to fortition rather than devoicing. However, the German phenomenon is similar to the final devoicing in other languages in that the opposition between two different kinds of obstruents disappears at the ends of words, and in fact at the ends of all syllables, making homophones of such pairs as ("wheel") and ("council, counsel"), both pronounced . The German varieties of the north, and many pronunciations of Standard German, involve voice in the distinction between fortis and lenis obstruents however. Final devoicing applies to all plosives and fricatives, and to loan words as well as native words.
Some examples from Northern German include:
Russian
Final-obstruent devoicing can lead to the neutralization of phonemic contrasts in certain environments. For example, Russian ('demon', phonemically ) and ('without', phonemically ) are pronounced identically in isolation as .
The presence of this process in Russian is also the source of the seemingly variant transliterations of Russian names into ''-off'' (Russian: ), especially by the French, as well as older English transcriptions.
Devoicing in compounds
In compounds, the behaviour varies between languages:
* In some languages, devoicing is lexicalized, which means that words that are devoiced in isolation retain that final devoicing when they are part of a compound. In English, for example, there is an alternation between voiced and voiceless fricatives in pairs such as the following:
** thief ( ''f – thieve ( ''v
** bath ( ''θ – bathe ( ''ð
The process is not productive in English, however; see article Consonant voicing and devoicing.
* In other languages, it is purely phonological. which means that voicing depends solely on position and on assimilation with adjacent consonants. Example: German.
Notes
References
*
*Brockhaus, Wiebke. (1995). Final Devoicing in the Phonology of German. Max Niemeyer.
*
*
*
* Crowley, Terry & Bowern Claire. (2010). ''An Introduction to Historical Linguistics'' (Fourth ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
See also
* Consonant voicing and devoicing
*Lenition
In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a pa ...
* Surface filter
External links
Final Devoicing or 'Why does sound like ?'
– explanation of devoicing with regard to Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as ...
Final Devoicing
– extract (with illustrative audio clips) from Peter Ladefoged's ''A Course in Phonetics''
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050326010845/http://lab.chass.utoronto.ca/rescentre/german/TalkingMap/Devoicing-source.htm , date=2005-03-26 – from ''The Talking Map , Tips for pronunciation''
Phonology
Phonetics
Phonotactics