15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Towards a Typology of Phonological Quantity in the Dialects of Modern Swedish

Felix Schaeffler, Pär Wretling

Umeå University, Sweden

This study examines phonological quantity and its phonetic outcome in a large range of modern Swedish dialects. It focusses on the so-called complementary quantity pattern and the accompanying differences in vocalic quality. The results show that the amount of complementarity in quantity distinctions varies systematically across the dialects. This is due to reduced differences between long and short consonants.
   Furthermore we found some indication that the spectral difference between long and short vowels increases when the degree of complementarity decreases.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Schaeffler, Felix / Wretling, Pär (2003): "Towards a typology of phonological quantity in the dialects of modern Swedish", In ICPhS-15, 2697-2700.