Swedish Phonology - Phonotactics

Phonotactics

At a minimum, a word must consist of either a long vowel or a short vowel and a long consonant. Like many other Germanic languages, Swedish has a tendency for closed syllables with a relatively large amount of consonant clusters in initial as well as final position. Though not as complex as that of most Slavic languages, examples of up to 7 consecutive consonants can occur when adding Swedish inflections to some foreign loanwords or names, and especially when combined with the tendency of Swedish to make long compound nouns. The syllable structure of Swedish can therefore be described with the following formula:

(C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)

This means that a Swedish one-syllable morpheme can have up to three consonants preceding the vowel that forms the nucleus of the syllable, and three consonants following it. Examples: skrämts (verb 'scare' past participle, passive voice) or sprängts (verb "explode" past participle, passive voice). All but one of the consonant phonemes, /ŋ/, can occur at the beginning of a morpheme, though there are only 6 possible three-consonant combinations, all of which begin with /s/, and a total of 31 initial two-consonant combinations. All consonants except for /h/ and /ɕ/ can occur finally, and the total amount of possible final two-consonant clusters is 62. In some cases this can result in near-unpronounceable combinations, such as in västkustskt listen, consisting of västkust ('west coast') with the adjective suffix -sk and the neuter suffix -t.

Central Standard Swedish and most other Swedish dialects feature a rare "complementary quantity" feature wherein a phonologically short consonant follows a long vowel and a long consonant follows a short vowel; this is true only for stressed syllables and all segments are short in unstressed syllables. This arose from the historical shift away from a system with a four-way contrast (that is, VːCː, VC, VːC, and VCː were all possible) inherited from Proto-Germanic to a three-way one (VC, VːC, and VCː), and finally the present two-way one; certain Swedish dialects have not undergone these shifts and exhibit one of the other two phonotactic systems instead. In literature on Swedish phonology, there are a number of ways to transcribe complementary relationship, including:

• A length mark ː for either the vowel (/viːt/), the consonant (/vitː/), or both.
• Gemination of the consonant (/vit/ vs. /vitt/)
• Diphthongization of the vowel (/vijt/ vs. /vit/)
• The position of the stress marker (/viˈt/ vs. /vitˈ/)

With the conventional assumption that medial long consonants are ambisyllabic (that is, penna, 'pen', is syllabified as ), all stressed syllables are thus "heavy." In unstressed syllables, the distinction is lost between /u/ and /o/ or between /e/ /ɛ/. With each successive post-stress syllable, the number of contrasting vowels decreases gradually with distance from the point of stress; at three syllables from stress, only and occur.