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Galician phonology


This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the Galician language.

Galician has seven vowel phonemes. These same ones are found under stress in standard Italian, standard Catalan, and Brazilian Portuguese (when counting its "nasal vowels" as diphthongs). It is likely that this 7-vowel system was even more widespread in the early stages of Romance languages.

Some characteristics of the vocalic system:

Galician language possesses a large set of falling diphthongs:

There are also a certain number of rising diphthongs, but they are not characteristic of the language and tend to be pronounced as hiatus.

Voiced plosives (/ɡ/, /d/ and /b/) are lenited (weakened) to approximants or fricatives in all instances, except after a pause or a nasal consonant; e.g. un gato 'a cat' is pronounced [uŋ ˈɡatʊ], whilst o gato 'the cat' is pronounced [ʊ ˈɣatʊ].

During the modern period, Galician consonants have undergone significant sound changes that closely parallel the evolution of Spanish consonants, including the following changes that neutralized the opposition of voiced fricatives / voiceless fricatives:

For a comparison, see Differences between Spanish and Portuguese: Sibilants. Additionally, during the 17th and 18th centuries the western and central dialects of Galician developed a voiceless fricative pronunciation of /ɡ/ (a phenomenon called gheada). This may be glottal [h], pharyngeal [ħ], uvular [χ], or velar [x].


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