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Faroese phonology


Faroese has a sound system similar to closely related Icelandic, including such features as an aspiration contrast in stop consonants and a lack of vowel length, features rare among Germanic languages.

As with other Germanic languages, Faroese has a large number of vowel phonemes; by one analysis, long and short vowels may be considered separate phonemes, with 26 in total. Vowel distribution is similar to other North Germanic languages in that short vowels appear in closed syllables (those ending in consonant clusters or long consonants) and long vowels appearing in open syllables. Árnason (2011) provides the following alternations:

Faroese avoids having a hiatus between two vowels by inserting a glide between them.

There is considerable variation among dialects in the pronunciation of vowels.

The only unstressed vowels in Faroese are short [a, ɪ, ʊ]; these appear in inflectional endings: áðrenn (e.g. [ˈɔaːʐɪnː] 'before'). Very typical are endings like -ur, -ir, -ar. The dative is often indicated by [ʊn].

In some dialects, unstressed short /ʊ/ is realized as [ø] or is reduced further to [ə]. /ɪ/ goes under a similar reduction pattern so unstressed /ʊ/ and /ɪ/ can rhyme. This can cause spelling mistakes related to these two vowels. The following table displays the different realizations in different dialects.

The so-called "skerping" ([ʃɛʂpɪŋk] 'sharpening') is a typical phenomenon of fronting back vowels before [kv] and monophthongizing certain diphthongs before long [tʃː]. Skerping is not indicated orthographically.


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