Luxembourgish phonology

This article aims to describe the phonology and phonetics of central Luxembourgish, which is regarded as the emerging standard.

Consonants

The consonant inventory of Luxembourgish is quite similar to that of Standard German.

* are bilabial, is bilabial-labiodental, whereas are labiodental.
** occurs only in loanwords from Standard German. Just as among many native German-speakers, it tends to be simplified to word-initially. For example, ('obligation') is pronounced , or in careful speech .
** is realized as when it occurs after , e.g. ('two').
* are voiceless fortis . They are aspirated in most positions, but not when or precedes in the same syllable, or when another plosive or affricate follows. The fortis affricates are unaspirated and thus contrast with the lenis ones by voicing alone.
** If followed by a vowel, the fortis stops are moved to the onset of the following syllable and voiced to ; see below.
* are unaspirated lenis, more often voiceless than voiced . The lenis affricates are truly voiced.
* as a phoneme appears only in a few words, such as ('to go for a walk'). as a phoneme occurs only in loanwords from English.
** Note that phonetic and occur due to voicing of word-final and ; see below.
* and only contrast between vowels. does not occur word-initially except in French and English loanwords. In the oldest loans from French it is often replaced with .
* are velar, is palatal whereas is uvular.
** is frequently realized as , e.g. or ('June').
** The normal realization of is more often a trill than a fricative . The fricative variant is used after short vowels before consonants. If the consonant is voiceless, the fricative is also voiceless, i.e. . Older speakers use the consonantal variant also in the word-final position, where younger speakers tend to vocalize the to , as in German and Danish.
* have two types of allophones: alveolo-palatal and uvular . The latter occur after back vowels, whereas the former occur in all other positions.
** The allophone appears only in a few words intervocalically, e.g. ('mirror'), (inflected form of 'high'). Note that an increasing number of speakers do not distinguish between the alveolo-palatal allophones and the postalveolar phonemes .

In external sandhi, syllable-final is deleted unless followed by , with few exceptions. Furthermore, some unusual consonant clusters may arise post-lexically after cliticisation of the definite article (for feminine, neuter and plural forms), e.g. ('the country') or ('the cross'). Due to cluster simplification this article often disappears entirely between consonants.

Word-final obstruents

In the word-final position the contrast between the voiceless on the one hand and the voiced on the other is neutralized in favor of the former, unless a word-initial vowel follows in which case the obstruent is voiced and are resyllabified, that is, moved to the onset of the first syllable of the next word (the same happens with , which becomes , and the non-native affricate , which is also voiced to ). For instance, (phonemically ) is pronounced , although this article transcribes it so that it corresponds more closely to the spelling. Similarly, is pronounced ('an interesting idea'), with a voiced .

Pronunciation of the letter ''g''

In Luxembourgish, the letter ''g'' has no fewer than nine possible pronunciations, depending both on the origin of a word and the phonetic environment. Natively, it is pronounced initially and elsewhere, the latter being devoiced to at the end of a morpheme. Words from French, English and (in a few cases) German have introduced (devoiced ) in other environments, and French orthography's "soft ''g''" indicates (devoiced ). By the now very common mergers of and , as well as and , this number may be reduced to seven, however.

In the unstressed intervocalic position when simultaneously following and preceding or , may lose its friction and become an approximant , as in 'cheap (infl.)'. This is generally not obligatory and it happens regardless of whether merges with , proving that the underlying phoneme is still ().

Vowels

* are close to the corresponding cardinal vowels .
** Some speakers may realize as open-mid , especially before .
* is most usually realized as a mid central vowel with slight rounding (). Before velars, it is fronted and unrounded to , though this is sometimes as open as . Contrary to Standard German, the sequence of and a sonorant never results in a syllabic sonorant; however, Standard German spoken in Luxembourg often also lacks syllabic sonorants, so that e.g. is pronounced , rather than .
* are higher than close-mid and may be even as high as .
** Before , is realized as open-mid .
* The quality of matches the prototypical IPA value of the symbol ().
* is the realization of a non-prevocalic, unstressed sequence .
* is near-open .
* , a phonological back vowel (the long counterpart of ), is phonetically near-front . Sometimes, it may be as front and as high as (), though without losing its length.
* The nasal vowels appear only in loanwords from French, whereas the oral front rounded vowels appear in loans from both French and German.
** The opposition between close-mid and open-mid vowels does not exist in native Luxembourgish words. In non-native words, there is a marginal contrast between the close-mid and the open-mid .
** The short non-native is distinct from only on a phonemic level, as the latter is fronted and unrounded to before velars (cf. the surname ). In other positions, they are perceived as the same sound, as shown in the spelling of the word 'public' (loaned from German , meaning the same). For this reason, it is not differentiated from in phonetic transcription (so that is transcribed ). The long counterpart of this sound is transcribed with in both types of transcription, which does not imply a difference in quality.
* The starting points of are typically schwa-like , but the first element of may be more of a centralized front vowel .
* The starting points of , as well as and are similar to the corresponding short monophthongs .
** The first elements of may be phonetically short in fast speech or in unstressed syllables.
* The centering diphthongs end in the mid central unrounded area .
* appears only in loanwords from Standard German.

The and contrasts arose from a former lexical tone contrast: the shorter were used in words with Accent 1, whereas the lengthened were used in words with Accent 2 (see Pitch-accent language#Franconian dialects.) The contrast between the two sets of diphthongs is only partially encoded in orthography, so that the fronting are differentiated as or vs. , whereas can stand for either or . The difference is phonemic in both cases and there are minimal pairs such as 'elevated' vs. 'decent' and 'rotten' vs. 'lazy'. The diphthongs contrast mainly in monosyllabics. In penultimate syllables, the short occur mainly before voiced consonants and in hiatus, whereas the long occur mainly before voiceless consonants (including phonetically voiceless consonants that are voiced in their underlying form). The last traces of the dative forms of nouns show a shortening from to ; compare the nominative forms 'body' and 'house' with the corresponding dative forms and .

Additional phonetic diphthongs arise after vocalisation of after long vowels. In loanwords from Standard German (such as and ) and also occur. The sequence is monophthongized to , unless a vowel follows within the same word. It is also sporadically retained in the environments where it is vocalized after other long vowels, which is why the merger with the monophthong is assumed to be phonetic, rather than phonemic. This variation is not encoded in transcriptions in this article, where the phonetic output of is consistently written with .

after short vowels is not vocalized but fricativized to or , depending on the voicing of the following sound (the lenis stops count as ''voiced'' despite their being unaspirated with variable voicing). The fricativization and devoicing to also occurs whenever the non-prevocalic is retained between and a fortis consonant, as in 'black', alternatively pronounced . Thus, when the is retained on a phonetic level, patterns at least partially with ''short'' vowels. When the following consonant is lenis or the occurs before a pause, it is unclear whether the more common consonantal realization of is a fricative or a trill.

Sample

The sample text is a reading of the first sentence of The North Wind and the Sun. The transcription is based on a recording of a 26-year-old male speaker of Central Luxembourgish.

Phonemic transcription

Phonetic transcription

Orthographic version

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Luxembourgish Phonology

phonology
Germanic phonologies