Virittäjä-lehden hakemistot

Päivitetty 1.1.2002 – Palautteet

Virittäjä-lehti > Hakemistot > Kirjoitukset ja tiivistelmät: 3/1997 (101)

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 <bdg> is studied here using a dataset of free spoken Finnish. The data comprises material from 40 different speakers divided into ten age-groups.

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

The older the speaker, the less often he or she uses lexical items that include the graphemes <bg>, 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, <bg> 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, <bg> are often pronounced as voiced plosives, but on subsequent occasions are unvoiced. Voicing is also closely connected with the lexical item: in proper nouns <bg> are voiced more frequently than in common nouns, and if the phonetic form of the word has otherwise developed away from its orthographic form, <bg> 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 [b] is there the kind of regularity observable that would justify the assumption that behind it lay the phoneme */b/.