West Frisian phonology

This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the West Frisian language.

Consonants

  are bilabial, and  are labiodental.
  is often included with the diphthongs, rather than the consonants, as it occurs only in rising diphthongs and sequences of a long vowel followed by glide (see the Diphthongs section). However, since they are analysed and transcribed as consonants in this article,  is included here as a consonant.  contrasts with  in for example the pair belove  - bliuwe .
 In some cases,  alternates with .
  does not occur before other alveolar consonants. An exception to that rule are recent loanwords from Standard Dutch (sport), which may or may not be pronounced with .
 The alveolar  are laminal, laxer than in English (with graver friction) and are variably retracted to , depending on the environment. The phonetic affricates  (as in tsiis  'cheese' and skodzje  'shake') are subject to the same kind of variation. As in Greek,  and  are considered to be stop–fricative sequences in their underlying form.
  are velar,  is a post-velar fricative trill  and  is palatal.
 Among fricatives, neither  nor any of the voiced fricatives can occur word-initially except for .
 Glottal stop  may precede word-initial vowels. In careful speech, it may also occur between unstressed and stressed vowels or diphthongs.
 All consonants are unaspirated, as in Dutch. Thus, the voiceless plosives , ,  are realized , , .

Allophony
 has two allophones: an approximant , which appears word-initially, and a fricative , which occurs elsewhere.

The distinction between  and  is very marginal, and they are generally considered allophones of a single phoneme. The plosive  generally appears at the beginning of a word and at the beginning of a stressed syllable, with the fricative  occurring elsewhere. However, there are some cases that disturb that distribution, which shows that the allophony is not only caused by stress but also has a morphological factor:
 Compound words preserve intact each allophone of the individual words: berchgeit  "mountain goat" and needgefal  "emergency". That demonstrates plosive  before unstressed syllables.
 Some suffixes draw the stress onto themselves without readjusting the allophones: hartoch  "duke" → hartoginne  "duchess". That creates cases of fricative  before stressed syllables.

Thus, it appears that the underlying representation of words includes the plosive-fricative distinction. In single-morpheme words, that representation follows the above rule of allophony, but in words with multiple morphemes the underlying status (plosive or fricative) must be known to recover the correct pronunciation.

The schwa  is often dropped in the combination , which turns the  into a syllabic sonorant. The specific sonorant that arises depends on the preceding consonant and so it is labial  when it is preceded by labial , alveolar  when it is preceded by labiodental or alveolar , and velar  when preceded by velar .

The schwa is commonly dropped also in  and , creating the syllabic sonorants  and , respectively. There are also some other cases.

The sequences  coalesce to , unless  occurs as a part of the rising diphthongs .

Final-obstruent devoicing
West Frisian has final obstruent devoicing and so voiced obstruents are merged with the voiceless obstruents at the end of words. Thus, word-final  are merged into voiceless , although final  is rare. The spelling reflects that in the case of the fricatives but not in the case of the plosives, which are still written  and .

Vowels
The vowel inventory of West Frisian is very rich.

Monophthongs

 The long vowels are considerably longer than the short vowels. The former are generally over 250 ms, and the latter are generally under 150 ms.
 Some speakers merge the long vowels  with the centering diphthongs .
  is infrequent. It and the other long close rounded vowel  are absent in the Leeuwarden dialect.
  is phonetically central  and is quite similar to . It can be treated as its stressed equivalent. In phonemic transcription, many scholars transcribe it with , but  and  are occasionally used.
 Although they pattern with monophthongs, the long close-mid vowels transcribed  are often realized as narrow closing diphthongs . However, there are exceptions: for instance, speakers of the Hindeloopers dialect realize  as a long monophthong . Nearly all words with  are loanwords from Standard Dutch.
  does not occur before .
 Although they pattern with monophthongs, the long open-mid vowels transcribed  tend to be realized as centring diphthongs .
 The Hindeloopers and the Súdwesthoeksk dialects also feature open-mid front rounded vowels , which are not a part of the standard language.
 Many scholars transcribe  with , but  transcribes it with , following the usual transcription of the short open vowel in Dutch. Its phonetic quality has been variously described as central  and back .
  is central .

Diphthongs

 In southwestern dialects, the sequences  are monophthongized to short central .
 The closeness of both elements of  is somewhat variable and so its phonetic realization is .
 The first element of  is more like  than . Many scholars transcribe the sound as ,  transcribes it as , but this article transcribes it  to show that it is clearly distinct from the common diphthongal realization of  since it has a much lower starting point), and it is virtually identical to  in Standard Dutch.
 Some scholars transcribe  as , but others transcribe it as . Phonetically, the first element of the diphthong may be either  or less often .
 Some varieties realize  as . It is replaced by  in the Wood Frisian dialects.
 Many speakers realise  as rounded .

Rising and long diphthongs
Frisian is traditionally analysed as having both falling and rising diphthongs.  argues that the rising diphthongs are in fact glide-vowel sequences, not real diphthongs. That view is supported by  who transcribe them with consonant symbols , which is the convention that is used in this article.

Frisian also possesses sequences of a long vowel followed by a glide. According to Booij, the glide behaves as a consonant in such sequences since it is shifted entirely to the next syllable when a following vowel is added. Visser also includes sequences of a high vowel plus glide among these. Such sequences are transcribed with a consonant symbol in this article:
 aai  ~ aaien 
 bliuw  ~ bliuwen 
 moai  ~ moaie 
 iuw  ~ iuwen 
 bloei  ~ bloeie

Breaking
Some falling diphthongs alternate with rising diphthongs:

 The  -  alternation occurs only in the pair mentioned above.

References

Bibliography

Further reading

 
 
 
 

West Frisian language
Germanic phonologies