phonetics Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...

, clipping is the process of shortening the articulation of a phonetic segment, usually a

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

. 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'.

English

Many dialects of English (such as

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

General American English General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm), is the umbrella accent of American English used by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. ...

Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation (RP) is the Accent (sociolinguistics), accent of British English regarded as the Standard language, standard one, carrying the highest Prestige (sociolinguistics), social prestige, since as late as the beginning of the 2 ...

South African English South African English (SAfE, SAfEn, SAE, en-ZA) is the List of dialects of English, set of English language dialects native to South Africans. History British Empire, British settlers first arrived in the South African region in 1795, ...

and Standard Canadian English) have two types of non-phonemic clipping: pre-fortis clipping and rhythmic clipping. The first type occurs in a

stressed syllable In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is the relative emphasis or prominence given to a certain syllable in a word or to a certain word in a phrase or sentence. That emphasis is typically caused by such properties as i ...

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 Serbo-Croatian ( / ), also known as Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually i ...

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