Comparative Study of Estonian Swedish Voiceless Laterals: Are Voiceless Approximants Fricatives?

• Are voiceless approximants categorically distinct from voiceless fricatives? We address this question by means of acoustic analysis of voiceless laterals in Icelandic, Welsh, and the endangered variety Estonian Swedish. All three have a voiceless lateral functioning in contrast to a voiced lateral approximant. The analysis focused on duration – including any period of voicing (‘pre-voicing’) just before the release of the lateral – and the intensity of the voiceless lateral relative to the following vowel. Welsh showed no pre-voicing in the lateral, whilst Icelandic and Estonian Swedish did, though the latter less consistently. The Welsh voiceless lateral was also greater in relative intensity. This could be taken as a difference of phonetic category between a fricative [ɬ] in Welsh as against a voiceless approximant [l̥ ] in the other two languages, but we argue that the complexity of the data from Estonian Swedish excludes a categorical interpretation.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Estonian Swedish

pre-voicing

phonetic categories

lateral fricative

voiceless lateral

Publikations- och innehållstyp

kon (ämneskategori)

ref (ämneskategori)