This article is about the phonology of the Latvian language. It deals with synchronic phonology as well as phonetics.
Contents |
| Labial | Alveolar | Post- alveolar |
Palatal | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | [ŋ] | |
| Plosive | p b | t d | c ɟ | k ɡ | |
| Affricate | t͡s d͡z | t͡ʃ d͡ʒ | |||
| Fricative | (f) v | s z | ʃ ʒ | (x) | |
| Approximant | j | ||||
| Lateral | l | ʎ | |||
| Trill | r |
The consonant sounds /f x/ are only found in loanwords. [ŋ] is only an allophone of nasals before velars.
Latvian has six vowels, with length as distinctive feature:
| Front | Central | Back | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| short | long | short | long | short | long | |
| Close | i | iː | u | uː | ||
| Mid | ɛ | ɛː | (ɔ) | (ɔː) | ||
| Open | æ | æː | a | aː | ||
/ɔ ɔː/, and the diphthongs involving it other than /uɔ/, are confined to loanwords.
Vowel length ratio is about 1/2.5. Vowel length is phonemic and plays an important role in the language. For example koka [ˈkuɔka] means 'made of wood', kokā [ˈkuɔkaː] means 'on the tree'; pile [ˈpilɛ] means 'a drop', and pīle [ˈpiːlɛ] means 'a duck'.
Latvian also has 10 diphthongs (/ai ui ɛi au iɛ uɔ iu (ɔi) ɛu (ɔu)/), although some diphthongs are mostly limited to proper names and interjections.
Standard Latvian and, with a few minor exceptions, all of the Latvian dialects have fixed initial stress. Long vowels and diphthongs have a tone, regardless of their position in the word. This includes the so called "mixed diphthongs", composed of a short vowel followed by a sonorant. There are three types of tones:
Besides the three-tone system of the standard variety, there are also Latvian dialects with only two tones: in western parts of Latvia, the falling tone merged with the broken tone, while in eastern parts of Latvia the level tone merged with the falling tone. Hence, the Central Latvian traűks, dràugs, raûgs corresponds to Western Latvian traűks, draûgs, raûgs, and to Eastern Latvian tràuks, dràugs, raûgs.[1]
This system is similar to the ones found in Lithuanian, Swedish, Norwegian and Serbo-Croatian. The broken tone is similar to the Danish stød.
Latvian roots may alternate between [v] and [u] depending on whether the following segment is a vowel or a consonant. For example, the root Daugav- 'Daugava River' in the nominative case is [daʊɡavə], but is pronounced [daʊɡaʊpils] in the city name Daugavpils. In this example, the vocalic alternant [u] is realized as the off-glide of the diphthong /aʊ/. However, when following a vowel that does not form an attested Latvian diphthong (e.g. [iu]), [u] is pronounced as a monophthong, as in [zius] 'fish-NOM.SG.' (cf. [zivis] 'fish-NOM.PL.').
|
|||||