Final-obstruent devoicing

Final-obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as German, Dutch, Russian, Turkish, and Wolof. In such languages, voiced obstruents become voiceless before voiceless consonants and in pausa.

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:

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 from the early fifth century that suggests that this terminal devoicing^[1] 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.

Russian

Final-obstruent devoicing can lead to the neutralization of phonemic contrasts in certain environments. For example, Russian бес ('demon', phonemically /bʲes/) and без ('without', phonemically /bʲez/) are pronounced identically in isolation as [bʲes].

The presence of this process in Russian is also the source of the seemingly variant transliterations of Russian names into "-off" (Russian: -ов), 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]).

Relics of a final devoicing of "v" are to be found between words so related as "half" and "halves", and "knife" and "knives" distinguishing singular and plural.

Devoicing in compounds

In compounds, the behavior 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 German, for example, the devoicing of the word Abend [ˈaːbn̩t] "evening" is preserved in the compound Abendsonne [ˈaːbn̩tzɔnə]^[2] "evening sun", while the final /d/ in the plural Abende [ˈaːbn̩də] "evenings" retains the voice.
• In other languages, it is purely phonological. which means that voicing depends solely on position and on assimilation with adjacent consonants. Example: Slovene.

Languages with final-obstruent devoicing

Germanic languages

All modern continental West Germanic languages developed final devoicing, the earliest evidence appearing in Old Dutch around the 9th or 10th century. Gothic (an East Germanic language) also developed final devoicing independently.

• Afrikaans
• Dutch (also Old and Middle Dutch)
• Old and Middle English (for fricatives)
• German and varieties (also Middle High German^[3])
• Gothic (for fricatives)
• Limburgish (only for /v, z, ɣ/)
• Low German (also Middle Low German)
• Luxembourgish

Of the North Germanic languages, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish (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.

Romance languages

Among the Romance languages, word-final devoicing is common in the Gallo-Romance languages, which tend to exhibit strong Frankish influence (itself the ancestor of Old Dutch, above).

• Catalan
• Old French (preserved in certain Modern French inflections such as -if vs. -ive)
• Lombard
• Occitan
• Romansh

Romanian does not have it. Other Romance languages such as Italian rarely have words with final voiced consonants.

Slavic languages

Most Slavic languages exhibit final devoicing, but notably Serbo-Croatian (the Štokavian dialect) and Ukrainian do not.

• Belarusian
• Bulgarian
• Czech
• Macedonian
• Polish
• Russian
• Serbo-Croatian (Kajkavian and Čakavian dialects)
• Slovak
• Slovene
• Sorbian

Other languages

• Armenian (for stops)
• Azerbaijani
• Cypriot Greek as opposed to Standard Modern Greek
• Georgian (for stops)
• Korean (nuanced; see Korean phonology)
• Lithuanian
• Maltese
• Mongolian
• Tok Pisin
• Turkish (for stops)
• Yaghnobi

Note: Hungarian, which lies geographically between Germanic and Slavic languages, does not have it.

See also

• Initial-consonant voicing
• Surface filter

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