Dutch and Afrikaans In
Dutch and
Afrikaans, terminal devoicing results in homophones such as 'hard' and 'heart' as well as differences in consonant sounds between the singular and plural forms of nouns, for example (Dutch) and (Afrikaans) for 'wave–waves'. The history of the devoicing phenomenon within the
West Germanic languages is not entirely clear, but the discovery of a
runic inscription from the early fifth century suggests that this terminal devoicing originated in Frankish. Of the old West Germanic languages, Old Dutch, a descendant of Frankish, is the earliest to show any kind of devoicing, and final devoicing also occurred in Frankish-influenced
Old French.
Amelands, spoken on the
Wadden Sea island of
Ameland, is the only Dutch
dialect that does not feature final-obstruent devoicing.
English Standard varieties of
English do not have phonological final-obstruent devoicing of the type that neutralizes phonemic contrasts; thus pairs like
bad and
bat are distinct in all major
accents of English. Nevertheless, voiced obstruents are devoiced to some extent in final position in English, especially when phrase-final or when followed by a voiceless consonant (for example,
bad cat ). Additionally, the voiced alveolar stop /d/ is regularly devoiced in
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE).
Old English had final devoicing of , although the spelling did not distinguish and . It can be inferred from the modern pronunciation of
half with a voiceless , from an originally voiced fricative in Proto-Germanic (preserved in German and Gothic ). There was also final devoicing of to finally, evidenced by spellings like alongside .
German Final-obstruents devoicing occurs in the varieties from Northern Germany. The German contrast between
homorganic obstruents is more properly described as a
fortis and lenis opposition than an opposition of voiceless and voiced sounds. Therefore, the term
devoicing may be misleading, since voice is only an optional feature of German lenis obstruents. By contrast, the German term for the phenomenon,
Auslautverhärtung ("final-sound hardening"), refers to
fortition rather than devoicing. However, the German phenomenon is similar to the final devoicing in other languages in that the opposition between two different kinds of obstruents disappears at the ends of words, and in fact at the ends of all syllables, making homophones of such pairs as ("wheel") and ("council, counsel"), both pronounced . The German varieties of the north, and many pronunciations of Standard German, involve voice in the distinction between fortis and lenis obstruents however. Final devoicing applies to all plosives, affricates and fricatives, and to loan words as well as native words. Some examples from Northern German include:
Russian Final-obstruent devoicing can lead to the
neutralization of
phonemic contrasts in certain environments. For example, Russian ('demon', phonemically ) and ('without', phonemically ) are pronounced identically in isolation as . The presence of this process in Russian is also the source of the seemingly variant transliterations of Russian names into
-off (Russian: ), especially by the French, as well as older English transcriptions. ==Devoicing in compounds==