Phonetics[edit]

Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, which delays release, and the "hold" is lengthened.


In terms of consonant duration, Berber and Finnish are reported to have a 3-to-1 ratio,[4] compared with around 2-to-1 (or lower) in Japanese,[5] Italian, and Turkish.[4]

Phonology[edit]

Gemination of consonants is distinctive in some languages and then is subject to various phonological constraints that depend on the language.


In some languages, like Italian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Luganda, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. A short vowel within a stressed syllable almost always precedes a long consonant or a consonant cluster, and a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. In Classical Arabic, a long vowel was lengthened even more before permanently-geminate consonants.


In other languages, such as Finnish, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, both are phonemic; taka /taka/ 'back', takka /takːa/ 'fireplace' and taakka /taːkːa/ 'burden' are different, unrelated words. Finnish consonant length is also affected by consonant gradation. Another important phenomenon is sandhi, which produces long consonants at word boundaries when there is an archiphonemic glottal stop |otaʔ se| > otas se 'take it (imperative)!'.


In addition, in some Finnish compound words, if the initial word ends in an e, the initial consonant of the following word is geminated: jätesäkki 'trash bag' [jætesːækːi], tervetuloa 'welcome' [terʋetːuloa]. In certain cases, a v after a u is geminated by most people: ruuvi 'screw' /ruːʋːi/, vauva 'baby' [ʋauʋːa]. In the Tampere dialect, if a word receives gemination of v after u, the u is often deleted (ruuvi [ruʋːi], vauva [ʋaʋːa]), and lauantai 'Saturday', for example, receives a medial v [lauʋantai], which can in turn lead to deletion of u ([laʋːantai]).


Distinctive consonant length is usually restricted to certain consonants and environments. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among those that do are Pattani Malay, Chuukese, Moroccan Arabic, a few Romance languages such as Sicilian and Neapolitan, as well as many High Alemannic German dialects, such as that of Thurgovia. Some African languages, such as Setswana and Luganda, also have initial consonant length: it is very common in Luganda and indicates certain grammatical features. In colloquial Finnish and Italian, long consonants occur in specific instances as sandhi phenomena.


The difference between singleton and geminate consonants varies within and across languages. Sonorants show more distinct geminate-to-singleton ratios while sibilants have less distinct ratios. The bilabial and alveolar geminates are generally longer than velar ones.[4]


The reverse of gemination reduces a long consonant to a short one, which is called degemination. It is a pattern in Baltic-Finnic consonant gradation that the strong grade (often the nominative) form of the word is degeminated into a weak grade (often all the other cases) form of the word: taakka > taakan (burden, of the burden). As a historical restructuring at the phonemic level, word-internal long consonants degeminated in Western Romance languages: e.g. Spanish /ˈboka/ 'mouth' vs. Italian /ˈbokka/, both of which evolved from Latin /ˈbukka/.[6]

ini 'say'

inni 'those in question'

akal 'earth, soil'

akkal 'loss'

imi 'mouth'

immi 'mother'

ifis 'hyena'

ifiss 'he was quiet'

tamda 'pond, lake, oasis'

tamedda 'brown buzzard, hawk'

uses the raised dot (called an interpunct) to distinguish a geminated l from a palatal ll. Thus, paral·lel ('parallel') and Llull (Standard Catalan: [pəɾəlˈlɛl], [ʎuʎ]).

Catalan

uses b, d, g for short consonants, and p, t, k and pp, tt, kk are used for long consonants.

Estonian

are geminated by doubling the first letter only, thus the geminate form of sz /s/ is ssz /sː/ (rather than *szsz), and that of dzs /d͡ʒ/ is ddzs /d͡ʒː/.

Hungarian digraphs and trigraphs

The only digraph in , ny /ɲ/ is doubled in the same way: nny /ɲː/.

Ganda

In , geminated instances of the sound cluster [kw] (represented by the digraph qu) are always indicated by writing cq, except in the words soqquadro and beqquadro, where the letter q is doubled.[21] The gemination of sounds [ɲ], [ʃ] and [ʎ], (spelled gn, sc(i), and gl(i), respectively) is not indicated because these consonants are always geminated when occurring between vowels. Also the sounds [ts], [dz] (both spelled z) are always geminated when occurring between vowels, yet their gemination is sometimes shown, redundantly, by doubling the z as, e.g., in pizza [ˈpittsa].

Italian

In Japanese, non-nasal gemination (sokuon) is denoted by placing the "small" variant of the syllable Tsu (っ or ッ) between two syllables, where the end syllable must begin with a consonant. For nasal gemination, precede the syllable with the letter for mora N (ん or ン). The script of these symbols must match with the surrounding syllables.

In and Norwegian, the general rule is that a geminated consonant is written double, unless succeeded by another consonant. Hence hall ('hall'), but halt ('Halt!'). In Swedish, this does not apply to morphological changes (so kall, 'cold' and kallt, 'coldly' or compounds [so tunnbröd ('flatbread')]. The exception are some words ending in -m, thus hem ['home'] [but hemma ('at home')] and stam ['stem'], but lamm ['lamb', to distinguish the word from lam ('lame')], with a long /a/), as well as adjectives in -nn, so tunn, 'thin' but tunt, 'thinly' (while Norwegian has a rule always prohibiting two "m"s at the end of a word (with the exception being only a handful of proper names, and as a rule forms with suffixes reinsert the second "m", and the rule is that these word-final "m"s always cause the preceding vowel sound to be short (despite the spelling)).

Swedish

Syntactic gemination

West Germanic gemination

Glottal stop

Length (phonetics)

Vowel length

Syllabic consonant

Index of phonetics articles