Final obstruent devoicing

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Final obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as German, Dutch, Polish, and Russian, among others. In these languages, voiced obstruents in the syllable coda or at the end of a word become voiceless.

German

In the southern varieties of German, the contrast between homorganic obstruents is rather an opposition of fortis and lenis 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. Likewise, the German term for the phenomenon, Auslautverhärtung, does not refer to a loss of voice and is better translated as 'final hardening'. 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. The German varieties of the north, and many pronunciations of Standard German, do distinguish voiced and voiceless obstruents however. Some examples from German include:

• Laub 'foliage', pronounced [laʊ̯p]
• Rad 'wheel', pronounced [raːt]
• Zug 'train', pronounced [tsuːk]

Dutch

In Dutch and Afrikaans, terminal devoicing results in homophones such as hard 'hard' and hart 'heart' as well as differences in consonant sounds between the singular and plural forms of nouns, for example golf-golven (Dutch) and golf-golwe (Afrikaans) for 'wave-waves'.

The history of the devoicing phenomenon within the West Germanic languages is not entirely clear but the discovery of a runic inscription form the early fifth century that shows devoicing^[1], suggests that its origins are Frankish.

Russian

Phonological final obstruent devoicing can lead to the neutralization of phonemic contrasts in certain environments. For example, Russian нож 'a knife' (phonemically /noʐ/) and нош 'of burdens' (phonemically /noʂ/) are pronounced identically as [noʂ].

The presence of this process in Russian is also the source of the seemingly variant transliterations of Russian names into "-off", especially by the French.

English

English does 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 [bæd̥ kʰæt]). The most salient distinction between bad and bat is not the voicing of the final consonant but rather the duration of the vowel and the glottalization of final /t/: bad is pronounced [bæːd̥] while bat is [bæˀ(t)].

List of languages with final obstruent devoicing

• Afrikaans
• Armenian (for plosives)
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Czech
• Dutch
• Old and Middle English (for fricatives)
• Estonian (for plosives)
• Faroese
• Old French (preserved in certain Modern French inflections such as -if vs. -ive)
• Georgian
• German
• Modern Greek (pre-Katharevousa; no longer strictly applies)
• Icelandic
• Korean (nuanced; see Korean phonology)
• Limburgish (for z, g and v)
• Lombard
• Luxembourgish
• Macedonian
• Maltese
• Mongolian
• Occitan
• Polish
• Russian
• Sorbian
• Turkish (for plosives)

See also

• initial consonant voicing

References

• Brockhaus, Wiebke. (1995) Final Devoicing in the Phonology of German. Max Niemeyer Verlag.
• Crowley, Terry. (1997) An Introduction to Historical Linguistics. 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.

External links

• Final Devoicing or 'Why does <naoi> sound like <naoich>?' — explanation of devoicing with regard to Scottish Gaelic
• Final Devoicing — extract (with illustrative audio clips) from Peter Ladefoged's A Course in Phonetics
• Final Devoicing — from The Talking Map | Tips for pronunciation