Soinnillisten klusiilien b, d, g variaatiosta nykypuhekielessä

• Vesa Jarva

Avainsanat: fonologia, lainasanat (ks. myös kielikontaktit, sanastontutkimus), puhekieli (ks. myös puhuttu kieli)

Abstrakti

Variation in the voiced plosives b, d and g in spoken Finnish (englanti)

3/1997 (101)

Vesa Jarva ([e-mail])

VARIATION IN THE VOICED PLOSIVES B, D AND G IN MODERN SPOKEN FINNISH

The article contributes to the discussion about the voiced plosives b, d and g in Finnish. These plosives were originally unknown in Finnish but are now used in the orthography of new loan words. The plosive d also appears in indigenous Finnish words. Pronunciation of the graphemes is studied here using a dataset of free spoken Finnish. The data comprises material from 40 different speakers divided into ten age-groups.

Only is consistently voiced, and this in the younger age-groups. In the case of the following general conclusions can be made:

* The older the speaker, the less often he or she uses lexical items that include the graphemes , and these also have a voiceless variant. On the other hand, there are also fewer lexical items and less frequent voiced pronunciation when the speaker is less than 20 years old. * Most probable of all, will be pronounced as voiced plosives when preceding a vowel at the beginning of a word; they will be voiceless at the end of a word or in any consonant combination where they do not follow a nasal, a lateral or a trill. * When a word appears in discourse for the first time, are often pronounced as voiced plosives, but on subsequent occasions are unvoiced. Voicing is also closely connected with the lexical item: in proper nouns are voiced more frequently than in common nouns, and if the phonetic form of the word has otherwise developed away from its orthographic form, will also be pronounced more easily as unvoiced plosives. * [g] is an unusual variant and does not warrant the assumption of an independent phoneme */g/. Neither in the case of is there the kind of regularity observable that would justify the assumption that behind it lay the phoneme */b/.