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In phonetics and
phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a
doubled letter A digraph or digram (from the grc, δίς , "double" and , "to write") is a pair of characters used in the orthography of a language to write either a single phoneme (distinct sound), or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to ...
and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant.William Ham, ''Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing'', p. 1-18 Some phonological theories use "doubling" as a synonym for gemination, others describe two distinct phenomena. Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
, Berber, Danish,
Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also * ...
,
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada,
Punjabi Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to: * Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan * Punjabi language * Punjabi people * Punjabi dialects and languages Punjabi may also refer to: * Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
, Polish and Turkish. Other languages, such as
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...
, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates. Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Finnish and Estonian; however, in languages like Italian, Norwegian and Swedish, vowel length and consonant length are interdependent. For example, in Norwegian and Swedish, a geminated consonant is always preceded by a short vowel, while an ungeminated consonant is preceded by a long vowel. A clear example are the Norwegian words ('ceiling or roof' of a building), and ('thanks').


Phonetics

Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals,
approximants Approximants are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a ...
and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, which delays release, and the "hold" is lengthened. In terms of consonant duration, Berber and Finnish are reported to have a 3-to-1 ratio, compared with around 2-to-1 (or lower) in Japanese, (URL is author's "near final version" draft) Italian, and Turkish.


Phonology

Gemination of consonants is distinctive in some languages and then is subject to various phonological constraints that depend on the language. In some languages, like Italian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Luganda, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. A short vowel within a stressed syllable almost always precedes a long consonant or a consonant cluster, and a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. In Classical Arabic, a long vowel was lengthened even more before permanently-geminate
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
s. In other languages, such as Finnish, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, both are phonemic; 'back', 'fireplace' and 'burden' are different, unrelated words. Finnish consonant length is also affected by consonant gradation. Another important phenomenon is sandhi, which produces long consonants at word boundaries when there is an
archiphonemic In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
glottal stop > 'take it!' In addition, in some Finnish compound words, if the initial word ends in an , the initial consonant of the following word is geminated: 'trash bag' , 'welcome' . In certain cases, a after a is geminated by most people: 'screw' , 'baby' . In the
Tampere Tampere ( , , ; sv, Tammerfors, ) is a city in the Pirkanmaa region, located in the western part of Finland. Tampere is the most populous inland city in the Nordic countries. It has a population of 244,029; the urban area has a population ...
dialect, if a word receives gemination of after , the is often deleted ( , ), and 'Saturday', for example, receives a medial , which can in turn lead to deletion of ( ). Distinctive consonant length is usually restricted to certain consonants. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among them are Pattani Malay, Chuukese, Moroccan Arabic, a few
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
such as Sicilian and
Neapolitan Neapolitan means of or pertaining to Naples, a city in Italy; or to: Geography and history * Province of Naples, a province in the Campania region of southern Italy that includes the city * Duchy of Naples, in existence during the Early and Hig ...
as well as many High Alemannic German dialects, such as that of
Thurgovia Thurgau (; french: Thurgovie; it, Turgovia), anglicized as Thurgovia, more formally the Canton of Thurgau, is one of the 26 cantons forming the Swiss Confederation. It is composed of five districts and its capital is Frauenfeld. Thurgau is part ...
. Some African languages, such as Setswana and Luganda, also have initial consonant length: it is very common in Luganda and indicates certain grammatical features. In colloquial Finnish and in Italian, long consonants occur in specific instances as sandhi phenomena. The difference between singleton and geminate consonants varies within and across languages. Sonorants show more distinct geminate-to-singleton ratios while sibilants have less distinct ratios. The bilabial and alveolar geminates are generally longer than velar ones. The reverse of gemination reduces a long consonant to a short one, which is called ''degemination''. It is a pattern in Baltic-Finnic consonant gradation that the strong grade (often the nominative) form of the word is degeminated into a weak grade (often all the other cases) form of the word: > (burden, of the burden). As a historical restructuring at the phonemic level, word-internal long consonants degeminated in
Western Romance Western Romance languages are one of the two subdivisions of a proposed subdivision of the Romance languages based on the La Spezia–Rimini Line. They include the Gallo-Romance and Iberian Romance branches. Gallo-Italic may also be include ...
languages: e.g. Spanish /ˈboka/ 'mouth' vs. Italian /ˈbokka/, both of which evolved from Latin /ˈbukka/.


Examples


Afroasiatic languages


Arabic

Written
Arabic Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
indicates gemination with a diacritic ( ) shaped like a lowercase Greek omega or a rounded Latin ''w'', called the : . Written above the consonant that is to be doubled, the is often used to disambiguate words that differ only in the doubling of a consonant where the word intended is not clear from the context. For example, in Arabic, Form I verbs and Form II verbs differ only in the doubling of the middle consonant of the triliteral root in the latter form, ''e. g.'', (with full diacritics: ) is a Form I verb meaning ''to study'', whereas (with full diacritics: ) is the corresponding Form II verb, with the middle consonant doubled, meaning ''to teach''.


Berber

In Berber, each consonant has a geminate counterpart, and gemination is lexically contrastive. The distinction between single and geminate consonants is attested in medial position as well as in absolute initial and final positions. * 'say' * 'those in question' * 'earth, soil' * 'loss' * 'mouth' * 'mother' * 'hyena' * 'he was quiet' * 'pond, lake, oasis' * 'brown buzzard, hawk' In addition to lexical geminates, Berber also has phonologically-derived and morphologically-derived geminates . Phonologically-derived geminates can surface by concatenation (e.g. 'give him two!') or by complete assimilation (e.g. 'he will touch you'). The morphological alternations include imperfective gemination, with some Berber verbs forming their imperfective stem by geminating one consonant in their perfective stem (e.g. 'go! PF', 'go! IMPF'), as well as quantity alternations between singular and plural forms (e.g. 'hand', 'hands').


Austronesian languages

Austronesian languages in the
Philippines The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no), * bik, Republika kan Filipinas * ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas * cbk, República de Filipinas * hil, Republ ...
, Micronesia, and Sulawesi are known to have geminate consonants.Blust, Robert. (2013). ''The Austronesian Languages (Rev. ed.)''. Australian National University.


Kavalan

The Formosan language Kavalan makes use of gemination to mark intensity, as in 'bad' vs. 'very bad'.


Malay dialects

Word-initial gemination occurs in various Malay dialects, particularly those found on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula such as
Kelantan-Pattani Malay Kelantan-Pattani Malay (; ; in Pattani; in Kelantan) is an Austronesian language of the Malayic subfamily spoken in the Malaysian state of Kelantan and the neighbouring southernmost provinces of Thailand. It is the primary spoken language of ...
and
Terengganu Malay Terengganu Malay ( ms, Bahasa Melayu Terengganu; Terengganu Malay: ) is a Malayic language spoken in the Malaysian state of Terengganu all the way southward to coastal Pahang and northeast Johor. It is the native language of Terengganu Malays a ...
. Gemination in these dialects of Malay occurs for various purposes such as: * To form a shortened free variant of a word or phrase so that: ** > 'give' ** > 'to/at/from the shore' * A replacement of reduplication for its various uses (e.g. to denote plural, to form a different word, etc.) in Standard Malay so that: ** > 'children' ** > 'kite'


Tuvaluan

The Polynesian language Tuvaluan allows for word-initial geminates, such as 'overcooked'.


Indo-European languages


English

In English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive within root words. For instance, ''baggage'' is pronounced , not . However, phonetic gemination does occur marginally. Gemination is found across words and across morphemes when the last consonant in a given word and the first consonant in the following word are the same
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
,
nasal Nasal is an adjective referring to the nose, part of human or animal anatomy. It may also be shorthand for the following uses in combination: * With reference to the human nose: ** Nasal administration, a method of pharmaceutical drug delivery * ...
, or stop. For instance: * b: ''subbasement'' * d: ''midday'' * f: ''life force'' * g: ''egg girl'' * k: ''bookkeeper'' * l: ''guileless'' * m: ''calm man'' or ''roommate'' (in some dialects) or ''prime minister'' * n: ''evenness'' * p: ''lamppost'' (cf. lamb post, compost) * r: ''fire road'' * s: ''misspell'' or ''this saddle'' * sh: ''fish shop'' * t: ''cattail'' * th: ''both thighs'' * v: ''live voter'' * z: ''pays zero'' With affricates, however, this does not occur. For instance: * ''orange juice'' In most instances, the absence of this doubling does not affect the meaning, though it may confuse the listener momentarily. The following
minimal pair In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate ...
s represent examples where the doubling ''does'' affect the meaning in most accents: * ''ten nails'' versus ''ten ales'' * ''this sin'' versus ''this inn'' * ''five valleys'' versus ''five alleys'' * ''his zone'' versus ''his own'' * ''mead day'' versus ''me-day'' * ''unnamed'' versus ''unaimed'' * ''forerunner'' versus ''foreigner'' (only in some varieties of General American) In some dialects gemination is also found for some words when the suffix ''-ly'' follows a root ending in -l or -ll, as in: * ''solely'' but not * ''usually'' In some varieties of Welsh English, the process takes place indiscriminately between vowels, e.g. in ''money'' but it also applies with graphemic duplication (thus, orthographically dictated), e.g. ''butter''


French

In French, gemination is usually not phonologically relevant and therefore does not allow words to be distinguished: it mostly corresponds to an accent of insistence ("c'est terrifiant" realised �tɛʁ.ʁi.fjɑ̃, or meets hyper-correction criteria: one "corrects" one's pronunciation, despite the usual phonology, to be closer to a realization that one imagines to be more correct: thus, the word illusion is sometimes pronounced l.lyˈzjɔ̃by influence of the spelling. However, gemination is distinctive in a few cases. Statements such as She said ~ She said it /ɛl a di/ ~ /ɛl l‿a di/ can commonly be distinguished by gemination. In a more sustained pronunciation, gemination distinguishes the conditional (and possibly the future tense) from the imperfect: ''courrai'' (will run) /kuʁ.ʁɛ/ vs. ''courais'' (ran) /ku.ʁɛ/, or the indicative from the subjunctive, as in ''croyons'' (we believe) /kʁwa.jɔ̃ / vs. ''croyions'' (we believed) /kʁwaj.jɔ̃ /.


Greek

In
Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...
, consonant length was distinctive, e.g., 'I am of interest' vs. 'I am going to'. The distinction has been lost in the standard and most other varieties, with the exception of Cypriot (where it might carry over from Ancient Greek or arise from a number of synchronic and diachronic assimilatory processes, or even spontaneously), some varieties of the southeastern Aegean, and
Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...
.


Hindustani

Gemination is common in both
Hindi Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
and
Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Shadda diacritic, which is usually omitted from writings, and mainly written to clear ambiguity. In Hindi, gemination is represented by doubling the geminated consonant, enjoined with the Virama diacritic.


=Aspirated consonants

= Gemination of aspirated consonants in Hindi are formed by combining the corresponding non-aspirated consonant followed by its aspirated counterpart. In vocalised Urdu, the shadda is placed on the unaspirated consonant followed by the short vowel diacritic, followed by the '' do-cashmī hē'', which aspirates the preceding consonant. There are few examples where an aspirated consonant is truly doubled.


Italian

Italian is notable among the
Romance languages The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
for its extensive geminated consonants. In Standard Italian, word-internal geminates are usually written with two consonants, and geminates are distinctive. For example, , meaning 'he/she drank', is phonemically and pronounced , while ('he/she drinks/is drinking') is , pronounced . Tonic syllables are bimoraic and are therefore composed of either a long vowel in an open syllable (as in ) or a short vowel in a closed syllable (as in ). In varieties with post-vocalic weakening of some consonants (e.g. → 'reason'), geminates are not affected ( → 'May'). Double or long consonants occur not only within words but also at word boundaries, and they are then pronounced but not necessarily written: + = ('who knows') and ('I am going home') . All consonants except can be geminated. This word-initial gemination is triggered either lexically by the item preceding the lengthening consonant (e.g. by preposition 'to, at' in kˈkaːsa 'homeward' but not by definite article in a ˈkaːsa 'the house'), or by any word-final stressed vowel ([] 's/he spoke French' but [] 'I speak French').


Latin

In Latin, consonant length was distinctive, as in 'old woman' vs. 'year'. Vowel length was also distinctive in Latin, but was not reflected in the orthography. Geminates inherited from Latin still exist in Italian, in which and contrast with regard to and as in Latin. It has been almost completely lost in
French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
and completely in
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
. In West Iberian languages, former Latin geminate consonants often evolved to new phonemes, including some instances of nasal vowels in Portuguese and Old Galician as well as most cases of and in Spanish, but phonetic length of both consonants and vowels is no longer distinctive.


Nepali

In
Nepali Nepali or Nepalese may refer to : Concerning Nepal * Anything of, from, or related to Nepal * Nepali people, citizens of Nepal * Nepali language, an Indo-Aryan language found in Nepal, the current official national language and a language spoken ...
, all consonants have geminate counterparts except for . Geminates occur only medially. Examples: * – 'equal' ; – 'honour' * – 'disturb!' ; – 'authority' * – 'cook!' ; – 'certain'


Norwegian

In Norwegian, gemination is indicated in writing by double consonants. Gemination often differentiates between unrelated words. As in Italian, Norwegian uses short vowels before doubled consonants and long vowels before single consonants. There are qualitative differences between short and long vowels: * / – 'method' / 'must' * / – 'to search' / 'to take off' * / – 'theirs' / 'anger'


Polish

In Polish, consonant length is indicated with two identical letters. Examples: * – 'bathtub' * * – 'horror' * or – 'hobby' Consonant length is distinctive and sometimes is necessary to distinguish words: * – 'families'; – 'familial' * – 'sacks, bags'; – 'mammals', * – 'medicines'; – 'light, lightweight' Double consonants are common on morpheme borders where the initial or final sound of the suffix is the same as the final or initial sound of the stem (depending on the position of the suffix). Examples: * – 'before, previously'; from (suffix 'before') + (archaic 'that') * – 'give back'; from (suffix 'from') + ('give') * – 'swampy'; from ('swamp') + (suffix forming adjectives) * – 'brightest'; from (suffix forming superlative) + ('brighter')


Punjabi

Punjabi Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to: * Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan * Punjabi language * Punjabi people * Punjabi dialects and languages Punjabi may also refer to: * Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
is written in two scripts, namely, Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi. Both scripts indicate gemination through the uses of diacritics. In Gurmukhi the diacritic is called the which is written ''before'' the geminated consonant and is mandatory. In contrast, the '' shadda'', which is used to represent gemination in the Shahmukhi script, is not necessarily written, retaining the tradition of the original
Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it or a script directly derived from it, and th ...
and
Persian language Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken an ...
, where diacritics are usually omitted from writing, except to clear ambiguity, and is written ''above'' the geminated consonant. In the cases of aspirated consonants in the Shahmukhi script, the '' shadda'' remains on the consonant, not on the ''do-cashmī he''. Gemination is specially characteristic of Punjabi compared to other Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi-Urdu, where instead of the presence of consonant lengthening, the preceding vowel tends to be lengthened. Consonant length is distinctive in Punjabi, for example:


Russian

In Russian, consonant length (indicated with two letters, as in 'bathtub') may occur in several situations. Minimal pairs (or
chroneme In linguistics, a chroneme is a basic, theoretical unit of sound that can distinguish words by duration only of a vowel or consonant. The noun ''chroneme'' is derived , and the suffixed ''-eme'', which is analogous to the ''-eme'' in ''phoneme'' ...
s) exist, such as 'to hold' vs 'to support', and their conjugations, or 'length' vs 'long' adj. f. * Word formation or
conjugation Conjugation or conjugate may refer to: Linguistics *Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form * Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language Mathematics *Complex conjugation, the change ...
: ( 'length') > ( 'long') This occurs when two adjacent morphemes have the same consonant and is comparable to the situation of Polish described above. *
Assimilation Assimilation may refer to: Culture * Cultural assimilation, the process whereby a minority group gradually adapts to the customs and attitudes of the prevailing culture and customs ** Language shift, also known as language assimilation, the prog ...
. The spelling usually reflects the unassimilated consonants, but they are pronounced as a single long consonant. ** ( 'highest').


Spanish

There are phonetic geminate consonants in Caribbean Spanish due to the assimilation of /l/ and /ɾ/ in syllabic coda to the following consonant. Examples of Cuban Spanish:


Luganda

Luganda is unusual in that gemination can occur word-initially, as well as word-medially. For example, 'cat', 'grandfather' and 'madam' all begin with geminate consonants. There are three consonants that cannot be geminated: , and . Whenever morphological rules would geminate these consonants, and are prefixed with , and changes to . For example: * 'army' (root) > 'an army' (noun) * 'stone' (root) > 'a stone' (noun); is usually spelt * 'nation' (root) > 'a nation' (noun) * 'medicine' (root) > 'medicine' (noun)


Japanese

In Japanese, consonant length is distinctive (as is vowel length). Gemination in the syllabary is represented with the sokuon, a small : for hiragana in native words and for katakana in foreign words. For example, (, ) means 'came; arrived', while (, ) means 'cut; sliced'. With the influx of '' gairaigo'' ('foreign words') into Modern Japanese, voiced consonants have become able to geminate as well: () means '(computer) bug', and () means 'bag'. Distinction between voiceless gemination and voiced gemination is visible in pairs of words such as (, meaning 'kit') and (, meaning 'kid'). In addition, in some variants of colloquial Modern Japanese, gemination may be applied to some adjectives and adverbs (regardless of voicing) in order to add emphasis: (, 'amazing') contrasts with (, '''really'' amazing'); (, , 'with all one's strength') contrasts with (, , really'' with all one's strength').


Turkish

In Turkish gemination is indicated by two identical letters as in most languages that have phonemic gemination. * * Loanwords originally ending with a phonemic geminated
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...
are always written and pronounced without the ending gemination as in Arabic. * ( hajj) (from Arabic pronounced ) * ( Islamic calligraphy) (from Arabic pronounced ) Although gemination is resurrected when the word takes a suffix. * becomes ('to hajj') when it takes the suffix "-a" ('to', indicating destination) * becomes ('of calligraphy') when it takes the suffix "-ın" ('of', expressing possession) Gemination also occurs when a
suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carr ...
starting with a consonant comes after a word that ends with the same consonant. * ('hand') + ("-s", marks
plural The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...
) = ('hands'). (contrasts with , 's/he eliminates') * ('to throw') + ("-ed", marks past tense,
first person plural ''First Person Plural: My Life As A Multiple'' is a psychology-related autobiography written by Cameron West, who developed dissociative identity disorder (DID) as a result of childhood sexual abuse. In it, West describes his diagnosis, treatmen ...
) = ('we threw mth.). (contrasts with , 'waste')


Malayalam

In
Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry ( Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam wa ...
, compounding is phonologically conditioned so gemination occurs at words' internal boundaries. Consider following example: * + ( + ) – () Gemination also occurs in a single morpheme like () which has a different meaning from ().


Uralic languages


Estonian

Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also * ...
has three phonemic lengths; however, the third length is a suprasegmental feature, which is as much tonal patterning as a length distinction. It is traceable to allophony caused by now-deleted suffixes, for example half-long < * 'of the city' vs. overlong < * < * 'to the city'.


Finnish

Consonant length is phonemic in Finnish, for example ('fireplace', transcribed with the length sign or with a doubled letter ) and ('back'). Consonant gemination occurs with simple consonants ( : ) and between syllables in the pattern (consonant)-vowel-sonorant-stop-stop-vowel () but not generally in codas or with longer syllables. (This occurs in Sami languages and in the Finnish name , which is of Sami origin.) Sandhi often produces geminates. Both consonant and vowel gemination are phonemic, and both occur independently, e.g. , , , (Karelian surname, 'paint', 'model', and 'secular'). In Standard Finnish, consonant gemination of exists only in interjections, new loan words and in the playful word ''hihhuli'', with its origins in the 19th century, and derivatives of that word. In many Finnish dialects there are also the following types of special gemination in connection with long vowels: the southwestern special gemination (), with lengthening of stops + shortening of long vowel, of the type < ; the common gemination (), with lengthening of all consonants in short, stressed syllables, of the type > and its extension (which is strongest in the northwestern Savonian dialects); the eastern dialectal special gemination (), which is the same as the common gemination but also applies to unstressed syllables and certain clusters, of the types > and > .


Wagiman

In
Wagiman The Wagiman, also spelt Wagoman, Wagaman, Wogeman, and other variants, are an Aboriginal Australian people of the Northern Territory. Language The Wagiman language is a language isolate. It has been contrasted for its comparative roughness to th ...
, an
indigenous Australian language The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...
, consonant length in stops is the primary phonetic feature that differentiates fortis and lenis stops. Wagiman does not have phonetic voice. Word-initial and word-final stops never contrast for length.


Writing

In written language, consonant length is often indicated by writing a consonant twice (''ss'', ''kk'', ''pp'', and so forth), but can also be indicated with a special symbol, such as the shadda in Arabic, the dagesh in Classical Hebrew, or the sokuon in Japanese. In the
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...
, long consonants are normally written using the
triangular colon The colon alphabetic letter is used in a number of languages and phonetic transcription systems, generally for vowel length or tone. It resembles but differs from the colon punctuation mark, . In some fonts, the two dots are placed a bit closer ...
, e.g. ''penne'' ('feathers', 'pens', also a kind of pasta), though doubled letters are also used (especially for underlying phonemic forms, or in tone languages to facilitate diacritic marking). *
Catalan Catalan may refer to: Catalonia From, or related to Catalonia: * Catalan language, a Romance language * Catalans, an ethnic group formed by the people from, or with origins in, Northern or southern Catalonia Places * 13178 Catalan, asteroid #1 ...
uses the raised dot (called an interpunct) to distinguish a geminated from a palatal . Thus, ('parallel') and (Standard Catalan: , ). *
Estonian Estonian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Estonia, a country in the Baltic region in northern Europe * Estonians, people from Estonia, or of Estonian descent * Estonian language * Estonian cuisine * Estonian culture See also * ...
uses ''b'', ''d'', ''g'' for short consonants, and ''p'', ''t'', ''k'' and ''pp'', ''tt'', ''kk'' are used for long consonants. * Hungarian digraphs and trigraphs are geminated by doubling the first letter only, thus the geminate form of is (rather than *''szsz''), and that of is . * The only digraph in
Ganda Ganda may refer to: Places * Ganda, Angola * Ganda, Tibet, China * Ganda, the ancient Latin name of Ghent, a city in Belgium Other uses * Baganda or Ganda, a people of Uganda ** Luganda or Ganda language, a language of Uganda * ''Ganda'' and "Ga ...
, is doubled in the same way: . * In Italian, geminated instances of the sound cluster (represented by the digraph ) are always indicated by writing , except in the words and , where the letter is doubled. The gemination of sounds , and , (spelled , , and , respectively) is not indicated because these consonants are always geminated when occurring between vowels. Also the sounds , (both spelled ) are always geminated when occurring between vowels, yet their gemination is sometimes shown, redundantly, by doubling the as, e.g., in . *In Japanese, non-nasal gemination () is denoted by placing the "small" variant of the syllable ( or ) between two syllables, where the end syllable must begin with a consonant. For nasal gemination, precede the syllable with the letter for mora N ( or ). The script of these symbols must match with the surrounding syllables. * In Swedish and Norwegian, the general rule is that a geminated consonant is written double, unless succeeded by another consonant. Hence ('hall'), but ('Halt!'). In Swedish, this does not apply to morphological changes (so , 'cold' and , 'coldly' or compounds
o ('flatbread') O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''o'' (pronounced ), pl ...
The exception are some words ending in ''-m'', thus home' ut ('at home')and stem' but lamb', to distinguish the word from ('lame') with a long /), as well as adjectives in ''-nn'', so , 'thin' but , 'thinly' (while Norwegian has a rule always prohibiting two "m"s at the end of a word (with the exception being only a handful of proper names, and as a rule forms with suffixes reinsert the second "m", and the rule is that these word-final "m"s always cause the preceding vowel sound to be short (despite the spelling)).


Double letters that are not long consonants

Doubled orthographic consonants do not always indicate a long phonetic consonant. * In English, for example, the sound of ''running'' is not lengthened. Consonant digraphs are used in English to indicate the preceding vowel is a short (lax) vowel, while a single letter often allows a long (tense) vowel to occur. For example, ''tapping'' (from ''tap'') has a short ''a'' , which is distinct from the diphthongal long ''a'' in ''taping'' (from ''tape''). * In Standard
Modern Greek Modern Greek (, , or , ''Kiní Neoellinikí Glóssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...
, doubled orthographic consonants have no phonetic significance at all. *
Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The l ...
(the Korean alphabet) and its romanizations also use double consonants, but to indicate fortis articulation, not gemination. * In Klallam, a sequence of two sounds such as in a word like 'sleep' is not pronounced like a geminated stop with a long closure duration – rather the sequence is pronounced as a sequence of two individual sounds such that the first is released before the articulation of the second .


See also

* Syntactic gemination * West Germanic gemination * Glottal stop * Length (phonetics) * Vowel length * Syllabic consonant * Index of phonetics articles


References

{{Suprasegmentals Consonants Phonetics