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. Some examples from German include:

Laub 'foliage', pronounced [laʊ̯p]
Rad 'wheel', pronounced [ʁaːt]
Zug 'train', pronounced [ʦuːk]

In 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 'wave' and golwe 'waves'.

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

English does not have phonological final obtruent 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)].

[edit] List of languages with final obstruent devoicing

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

[edit] See also

initial consonant voicing

[edit] 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