Francis Nolan
UCL Speech Science Forum
27 th January, 2016
Estonian Swedish is an endangered variety of Swedish traditionally spoken on parts of the west coast of Estonia and some adjacent islands, and now largely confined to an elderly community of WW2 émigrés in Stockholm. Of particular interest here is its liquid system, which (like some other Scandinavian varieties) includes a retroflex flap and (more unusually) a voiceless lateral fricative. An acoustic analysis of this will be presented in terms of fricative energy and pre-voicing, and the Estonian Swedish lateral will compared with voiceless laterals from Welsh and Icelandic, all three languages having contrasting voiced and voiceless laterals. The measurements and behaviour of the sounds is used to address the question of whether voiceless approximants are categorically distinct from voiceless fricatives, and, more generally, whether the notion of ‘universal phonetic category’ as enshrined in the IPA framework is valid. The work has been done with Susanne Schötz (Lund) and Eva
Liina Asu (Tartu) in association with the project Estonian Swedish Language
Structure funded by the Swedish Research Council.