Final-obstruent devoicing

Final-obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as Catalan, German, Dutch, Breton, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and Wolof. In such languages, voiced obstruents become voiceless before voiceless consonants and in pausa. The process can be written as *C[+voice] > C[-voice]/__#.[1]

Sound change and alternation
Metathesis
Lenition
Fortition
Epenthesis
Elision
Transphonologization
Assimilation
Dissimilation
Sandhi
Other types

Languages with final-obstruent devoicing

Germanic languages

Most modern continental West Germanic languages developed final devoicing, the earliest evidence appearing in Old Dutch around the 9th or 10th century. However, Yiddish notably does not alter final voiced sounds; this appears to be a later reversal.

Of the North Germanic languages, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish (the latter 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, word-final devoicing is common in the Gallo-Romance languages, some of which tend to exhibit strong Frankish influence (itself the ancestor of Old Dutch, above).

Romanian does not have it. Other Romance languages such as French and Italian rarely have words with final voiced consonants for different reasons in their phonological histories, but borrowings from English into French or Italian that have a voiced final consonant (such as weekend) are not devoiced. Portuguese merges [s] and [z] in word-final position (nós and noz are homophones) but has a few words ending with voiced stops like sob (although some dialects feature an epenthetic vowel after the final consonant).

Slavic languages

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

Other Indo-European languages

Non-Indo-European languages

Note: Hungarian, which lies geographically between Germanic- and Slavic- speaking areas, does not have it. Terminal devoicing is indicated in the orthography in Turkish, but it isn't in Azeri. For example, the personal name Məhməd is pronounced [mæhˈmæt] in Azeri, with a final [t], even though it is spelled with a final ⟨d⟩. Meanwhile, the Turkish version of this name is also pronounced with a final [t], but is spelled with a more phonetically accurate Mehmet.

Examples

Dutch and Afrikaans

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 suggests that this terminal devoicing[4] 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.

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]).

Old English had final devoicing of /v/, although the spelling did not distinguish [f] and [v]. It can be inferred from the modern pronunciation of half with a voiceless /f/, from an originally voiced fricative [β] in Proto-Germanic *halbaz (preserved in German halb and Gothic halba). There was also final devoicing of [ɣ] to [x] finally, evidenced by spellings like burh alongside burg.

German

Final-obstruents devoicing occurs in the varieties from Northern Germany.[5] The German contrast between homorganic obstruents is more properly described as a fortis and lenis 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, making homophones of such pairs as Rad ("wheel") and Rat ("council, counsel"), both pronounced [ʁaːt]. The German varieties of the north, and many pronunciations of Standard German, optionally involve voice in the distinction between fortis and lenis obstruents however.

Some examples from Northern German include:

NounsVerbs
SingularTranslationPluralImperativeTranslationInfinitive
Bad [baːt]bathBäder [ˈbɛːdɐ]red! [ʁeːt]talk!reden [ˈʁeːdn̩]
Maus [maʊ̯s]mouseMäuse [ˈmɔʏ̯zə]lies! [liːs]read!lesen [ˈleːzn̩]
Raub [ʁaʊ̯p]robberyRaube [ˈʁaʊ̯bə]reib! [ʁaɪ̯p]rub!reiben [ˈʁaɪ̯bn̩]
Zug [t͡suːk]trainZüge [ˈt͡syːɡə]sag! [zaːk]say!sagen [ˈzaːɡn̩]
Fünf [fʏɱf]fiveFünfen [ˈfʏɱvn̩]

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, 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 German, for example, the devoicing of the word Abend [ˈaːbn̩t] "evening" is preserved in the compound Abendsonne [ˈaːbn̩tzɔnə] "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.

Notes
  1. See Crowley and Bowern (2010), p. 24
  2. In normalised Middle High German as opposed to modern New High German, devoicing is represented in writing, thus Kriemhilt is the shortened form of Kriemhilde.
  3. van der Veen, Klaas F. (2001), "13. West Frisian Dialectology and Dialects", in Munske, Horst Haider; Århammar, Hans (eds.), Handbook of Frisian studies, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, p. 104, ISBN 3-484-73048-X
  4. B. Mees, The Bergakker inscription and the beginnings of Dutch, in: Amsterdamer beiträge zur älteren Germanistik: Band 56- 2002, edited by Erika Langbroek, Annelies Roeleveld, Paula Vermeyden, Arend Quak, Published by Rodopi, 2002, ISBN 90-420-1579-9, ISBN 978-90-420-1579-1
  5. See Ammon et al. (2016)

References
  • Ammon, U., Bickel, H., & Lenz, A. N. (Eds.). (2016). Variantenwörterbuch des Deutschen: Die Standardsprache in Österreich, der Schweiz, Deutschland, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Ostbelgien und Südtirol sowie Rumänien, Namibia und Mennonitensiedlungen. de Gruyter. ISBN 9783110165746
  • Brockhaus, Wiebke. (1995). Final Devoicing in the Phonology of German. Max Niemeyer.
  • Chow, Daryl. (2018). Final devoicing in Singapore English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 144(3), 1902-1902. doi:10.1121/1.5068331
  • Dmitrieva, Olga. (2014). Final voicing and devoicing in American English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 136(4), 2174-2174. doi:10.1121/1.4899867
  • Grijzenhout, Janet. (2000). Voicing and devoicing in English, German, and Dutch: Evidence for domain-specific identity constraints. Theorie des Lexikons: Arbeiten des Sonderforschungsbereichs 282, 116.
  • Crowley, Terry & Bowern Claire. (2010). An Introduction to Historical Linguistics (Fourth ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195365542

See also
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