Rheinische Dokumenta - Consonants

Consonants

Since most dialects follow the German, and Lower Franconian, rule of final-obstruent devoicing, voiced consonants cannot, or hardly ever, appear at the end of a word or sentence. This is one of the major differences between Rheinische Dokumenta and Standard German writing, since Standard German orthography tries to keep word stems unaltered, even if pronunciation varies with suffixes, endings, or phonological rules. If there is assimilation or other sandhi across word boundaries which yields a consonant voiced at a word end, some authors write them as contractions or join the words with a dash "-" to avoid having final voiced consonants.