Clipping (phonetics)

In phonetics, clipping is the process of shortening the articulation of a phonetic segment, usually a vowel. A clipped vowel is pronounced more quickly than an unclipped vowel and is often also reduced.

Particularly in Netherlands Dutch, vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened and centralized, which is particularly noticeable with tense vowels; compare konijn [köˈnɛin] and koning [ˈkoːnɪŋ].

In weak forms of words, e.g. naar and voor, the vowel is frequently centralized: [näːr, föːr], though further reduction to [nə, fə] or [nr̩, fr̩] is possible in rapid colloquial speech.

English has two types of clipping, neither of which are phonemic.

In English, clipping without vowel reduction most often occurs in a stressed syllable before a voiceless consonant or Fortis consonant (called pre-fortis clipping), so that e.g. bet [ˈbɛt] has a vowel that is shorter than the one in bed [ˈbɛˑd].

Vowels preceding voiceless consonants that begin a next syllable (as in keychain /ˈkiː.tʃeɪn/) are not affected by the pre-fortis clipping.

Another type of clipping is rhythmic clipping, which occurs in polysyllabic words - the more syllables a word has, the shorter its vowels are, so that e.g. the first vowel of readership is shorter than in reader, which in turn is shorter than in read. This can be transcribed [ˈridəʃɪp], [ˈriˑdə] and [ˈriːd], respectively, though the rhythmic clipping is very rarely transcribed in IPA.

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