In phonetics, clipping is the process of shortening the articulation of a phonetic segment, usually a vowel. A clipped vowel is pronounced more quickly than an unclipped vowel and is often also reduced.

Examples

Dutch

Particularly in Netherlands Dutch, vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened and centralized, which is particularly noticeable with tense vowels; compare the phoneme in 'rabbit' and 'king'. In weak forms of words, e.g. and , the vowel is frequently centralized: (the latter approaching ''veur'', a dialectal form found in

Low Saxon Low Saxon, also known as West Low German ( nds, Nedersassisch, Nedersaksies; nl, Nedersaksisch) are a group of Low German dialects spoken in parts of the Netherlands, northwestern Germany and southern Denmark (in North Schleswig by parts of ...

and Limburgish dialects), though further reduction to or is possible in rapid colloquial speech.

English

Many dialects of English (such as

Australian English Australian English (AusE, AusEng, AuE, AuEng, en-AU) is the set of varieties of the English language native to Australia. It is the country's common language and ''de facto'' national language; while Australia has no official language, Eng ...

, General American English, Received Pronunciation,

South African English South African English (SAfrE, SAfrEng, SAE, en-ZA) is the set of English language dialects native to South Africans. History British settlers first arrived in the South African region in 1795, when they established a military holding op ...

and

Standard Canadian English Standard Canadian English is the largely homogeneous variety of Canadian English that is spoken particularly across Ontario and Western Canada, as well as throughout Canada among urban middle-class speakers from English-speaking families, ex ...

) have two types of non-phonemic clipping: pre-fortis clipping and rhythmic clipping. The first type occurs in a stressed syllable before a fortis consonant, so that e.g. ''bet'' has a vowel that is shorter than the one in ''bed'' . Vowels preceding voiceless consonants that begin a next syllable (as in ''keychain'' ) are not affected by this rule. Rhythmic clipping occurs in polysyllabic words. The more syllables a word has, the shorter its vowels are and so the first vowel of ''readership'' is shorter than in ''reader'', which, in turn, is shorter than in ''read''. Clipping with vowel reduction also occurs in many unstressed syllables. Because of the variability of vowel length, the diacritic is sometimes omitted in IPA transcriptions of English and so words such as ''dawn'' or ''lead'' are transcribed as and , instead of the more usual and . Neither type of transcription is more correct, as both convey exactly the same information, but transcription systems that use the length mark make it more clear whether a vowel is checked or free. Compare the length of the RP vowel in the word ''not'' as opposed to the corresponding in Canadian English, which is typically longer (like RP ) because Canadian is a free vowel (checked is very rare in North America, as it relies on a three-way distinction between , and ) and so can also be transcribed as . The Scottish vowel length rule is used instead of those rules in Scotland and sometimes also in Northern Ireland.

Serbo-Croatian

Many speakers of Serbo-Croatian from Croatia and Serbia pronounce historical unstressed long vowels as short, with some exceptions (such as genitive plural endings). Therefore, the name is pronounced , rather than .

References

Bibliography