The voicing contrast in Fenno-Swedish stops

This paper presents the results of an investigation of the fortis–lenis contrast in Fenno-Swedish stops. The data show that in utterance-initial position, the two-way contrast is realised as a contrast between unaspirated and prevoiced stops. Word-medially and finally, the contrast is that of voiceless, unaspirated stops and fully voiced stops. Fenno-Swedish is thus another Germanic language, like Dutch, Afrikaans and Yiddish, that has a contrast between plain unaspirated and prevoiced stops in utterance initial position. The stop contrast in Fenno-Swedish differs from that of Central Standard Swedish, in two ways: (i) In Central Standard Swedish the contrast is between aspirated and prevoiced stops in utterance initial position, whereas it is between voiceless, unaspirated stops and prevoiced stops in Fenno-Swedish; in medial and final position, one series of stops in Central Standard Swedish is voiceless (aspirated, preaspirated or unaspirated) and the other series is fully voiced, whereas in Fenno-Swedish, one series is voiceless and unaspirated and the other voiced, i.e., in Fenno-Swedish there is no aspiration. (ii) Variation was observed for some Fenno-Swedish speakers in the production of /b d ɡ/, with many tokens being completely voiceless and overlapping phonetically with tokens of /p t k/, whereas there is no overlap between the two stop categories in Central Standard Swedish. Stops in Finnish are voiceless and unaspirated. The fact that the aspirated stops have been lost in Fenno-Swedish, and the fact that there are voiceless occurrences of /b d ɡ/ tokens in Fenno-Swedish suggests influence from Finnish. Fenno-Swedish thus appears to pattern with other languages influenced by a language with a different system of laryngeal contrasts. ► We compare Fenno-Swedish stops with Central Swedish and Finnish stops. ► We observe that Fenno-Swedish /ptk/ are voiceless and unaspirated. ► Fenno-Swedish /bdɡ/ are mainly voiced, but with many completely voiceless tokens. ► We argue that Fenno-Swedish stop voicing has been influenced by Finnish.