In phonetics, preaspiration (sometimes spelled pre-aspiration) is a period of voicelessness or aspiration preceding the closure of a voiceless obstruent, basically equivalent to an -like sound preceding the obstruent. In other words, when an obstruent is preaspirated, the glottis is opened for some time before the obstruent closure. To mark preaspiration using the International Phonetic Alphabet, the diacritic for regular aspiration, , can be placed before the preaspirated consonant. However, prefer to use a simple cluster notation, e.g.
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It is the only dialect of Dutch which does not feature final obstruent devoicing.
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2008Lieb, Hans-Heinrich. 2008. "The case for two-level phonology: German Obstruent Tensing and Nasal Alternation in French".
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Before other stops and fricatives, it assimilates, creating an effect of gemination. Before nasal syllables, the moraic obstruent may be realized, depending on the regional dialect, as a glottal stop , so that "fox" is pronounced . Other dialects exhibit gemination in this position, so that the latter is pronounced instead. At the end of utterances and in isolation, the moraic obstruent is predictably realized as a glottal stop , which may also suggest that a parallelism exists between the glottal stop in interjections and the moraic obstruent in standard Japanese itself.
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Voiced obstruents undergo final-obstruent devoicing so that ('cold', m. s.) is pronounced with , while ('cold', f. pl.) is pronounced with .
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Light syllables (syllables with short vowels and optionally also obstruent codas) do not have the two-way contrast of heavy syllables.
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Resonants only appear adjacent to vowels. When these sounds occur in the middle of words, they are found in sequences of resonant-obstruent, resonant-resonant, and obstruent-resonant. An initial resonant is always followed a vowel, and a final resonant must be preceded by one. The laryngeals are more restricted than members of the other natural classes in Halkomelem.
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Consonant Clusters Yugambeh- Bundjalung does not permit clusters of the same consonant, or clusters that begin with an obstruent phoneme or end with an approximant, except the labio- velar glide. All homorganic nasal-obstruent clusters occur in the language. Clusters usually only involve two segments, but clusters of three may occur if an intervening vowel is deleted by some process.
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If either of the two was voiceless, the whole cluster was devoiced, and the first obstruent also lost its labialisation, if it was present.
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The origins of consonant-vowel metathesis. Language 74(3):508-556.Yu, Alan C. L. 2004. Explaining final obstruent voicing in Lezgian: Phonetics and history.
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Similarly, the moraic obstruent corresponds to a reduced stop syllable. Contrary to the standard language, the moraic obstruent may occur word medially before any other sound except the moraic nasal. It may also occur in word-final position, which means that its phonetic realization cannot be immediately determined within the lexical unit. Like the moraic nasal, its place of articulation is mostly determined by the following consonant.
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The voicing of this consonant affects the realisation of the Non-High toneme roughly as follows: If the consonant is a voiced obstruent, the Non-High toneme is realised as Low (è-ḏà 'snake') and if the consonant is a voiceless obstruent or a sonorant, the Non- High toneme is realised as Mid (ām̲ē 'person', à-f̱ī 'mouse'). The consonants that induce tonal alternations in this way are sometimes called depressor consonants.
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Plosives that are preceded by any other obstruent, or followed by any consonant, do not display gradation. There are two types of gradation present in Finnish; these are detailed below.
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Two constraints may be conjoined as a single constraint, called a local conjunction, which gives only one violation each time both constraints are violated within a given domain, such as a segment, syllable or word. For example, []segment is violated once per voiced obstruent in a coda ("VOP" stands for "voiced obstruent prohibition"), and may be equivalently written as . Local conjunctions are used as a way of circumventing the problem of phonological opacity that arises when analyzing chain shifts.
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Before [ɛ] or [ɔ] it is nasalized [æ]. /o/ is a mid back vowel. It is weakly rounded. Its high allophone [ʊ] occurs in postconsonantal position before [i] or an oral obstruent.
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"The case for two-level phonology: German Obstruent Tensing and Nasal Alternation in French". In: Robin Sackmann (ed.). Explorations in Integrational Linguistics: four essays on German, French, and Guaraní. (Studies in Integrational Linguistics, 1).
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Ordinals are formed adding the suffix -(d)lag: sey 'three', seydlag 'third'. The d is omitted if the root ends with an obstruent or nasal consonant: dut 'two', dutlag 'second'.Ehrbar, Greg. Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
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In Romanian, becomes the velar in word-final positions (duh 'spirit') and before consonants (hrean 'horseradish'). In Czech, the phoneme followed by a voiced obstruent can be realized as either or , e.g. abych byl .Kučera, H. (1961).
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He donated his house to the new society for use as its headquarters. In his study of the Japanese language, Lyman noticed that a necessary condition for the voicing (technically rendaku) of the initial obstruent of the second word in a compound is that the word contain no voiced obstruent in a later syllable. (A sufficient condition for predicting rendaku is not known.) This constraint has come to be known as "Lyman's Law". After Lyman returned to Northampton, he spent the next several years working on his reports, which he published at his own expense.
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Compare sonorant (resonant), which includes vowels, approximants and nasals but not fricatives, and contrasts with obstruent. In phonology, continuant as a distinctive feature also includes trills. Whether lateral fricatives and approximants and taps/flaps are continuant is not conclusive.
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Voiced consonants (, and ) are devoiced word-finally unless the next word begins with a voiced obstruent. also represents voiceless word-finally in some words, such as . This is related to the use of the marginal (or dialectal) phoneme in some religious words .
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It results in vowel nasalization also medially between a short vowel and a non-obstruent (' "you (acc.)". It is pronounced as a homorganic nasal, with the preceding vowel becoming nasalized allophonically, in the following cases: between a long vowel and a voiced stop (' "copper", ' "silver"), between a long vowel and a voiceless stop (' "tooth"), and also between a short vowel and an obstruent (' "to support", The last rule has two sets of exceptions where the effects only a nasalization of the preceding short vowel. Words from the first set are morphologically derived from words with a long nasalized vowel (' , "meat". In such cases the vowel is sometimes denasalized (.
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An obstruent is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by obstructing airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate.Gussenhoven, Carlos; Haike, Jacobs. Understanding Phonology, Fourth Edition, Routledge, 2017 All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include both vowels and consonants.
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It is voiceless and aspirated [kʰ] before an obstruent or open juncture. It is voiced and released [g] before a vowel or resonant. /s/ is a spirant with blade-alveolar groove articulation [s]. It is always voiceless, and is fortified to [s˰] everywhere except between vowels.
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The Suzhou dialect is usually taken as representative, because Shanghainese features several atypical innovations. Wu varieties are distinguished by their retention of voiced or murmured obstruent initials (stops, affricates and fricatives). ;Gan :These varieties are spoken in Jiangxi and neighbouring areas. The Nanchang dialect is taken as representative.
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There're eight tones in the Làng Lỡ. Tones 1 to 6 are found on sonorant-final syllables (a.k.a. ‘live’ syllables): syllables ending in a vowel, semi-vowel or nasal. Tones 7 and 8 are found on obstruent-final syllables (a.k.a. ‘stopped’ syllables), ending in -p -t -c -k.
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Bernd J. Kröger (; born 1959 in Osnabrück, Germany) is a German phonetician and professor at RWTH Aachen University. He is known for his contributions in the field of neurocomputational speech processing, in particular the ACT model.Fuchs, Susanne. Articulatory correlates of the voicing contrast in alveolar obstruent production in German. Diss.
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Catalan is characterized by final-obstruent devoicing, lenition, and voicing assimilation; a set of 7 or 8 phonemic vowels, vowel assimilations (including vowel harmony), many phonetic diphthongs, and vowel reduction, whose precise details differ between dialects. Several dialects have a dark l, and all dialects have palatal l () and n ().
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There are three vowels that carry this feature: . It is quite common for nasalized to become a nasal and vice versa. Non- nasalized vowels can be heard as nasalized as well. In general, vowels tend to become nasalized adjacent to another nasal vowel or consonant when there is no intervening obstruent.
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Thurneysen sought to classify the alternations in a general rule as follows: # Spirants are written as voiced when the preceding vowel is unstressed, and that vowel is preceded by a voiceless consonant, hence -tub-. # The reverse applies if, in the same circumstances the preceding consonant is voiced, hence -duf. # If the preceding consonant is a cluster, two possibilities arise: ## If the cluster is of the form /TR/, ie it contains an obstruent followed by a liquid, it is classed as a voiced consonant, and the following consonant will therefore be unvoiced. ## If the cluster is of the form /TY/, ie the post-obstruent position is a glide, it is classed as a voiceless consonant, and the following consonant will be voiced.
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West Frisian has final obstruent devoicing, meaning that voiced obstruents are merged with the voiceless ones at the end of a word. Thus, word-final are merged into voiceless , although final is rare. The spelling reflects this in the case of the fricatives, but not in the case of the plosives, which remain spelled with and .
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The most common morpheme structure is CVCVC where C is any consonant and V is any vowel. Consonant clusters are rare and consist only of a nasal plus a homorganic obstruent or the glide element of a diphthong. Intervocalic voiceless stops are voiced before a morpheme boundary (but not following one) . Stress falls on the ultimate syllable.
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Some speech phenomena may lead to the neutralization of phonemic contrasts, which means that a contrast that exists in the language is not utilized in order to differentiate words due to sound change. For example, due to final-obstruent devoicing, Russian бес ('demon', phonemically /bʲes/) and без ('without', phonemically /bʲez/) are pronounced identically in isolation as [bʲɛs].
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All obstruents (except the glottals) typically follow one another in sequences of up to four, although a sequence of five is also possible (e.g. as in txʷstx̌ʷásʔal "just standing in shock"). There are no specific restrictions on the types of obstruent sequences that can occur. Plosives appearing in sequences are rearticulated, and sequences of /ss/ are common in the language.
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Final-obstruent devoicing can lead to the neutralization of phonemic contrasts in certain environments. For example, Russian ('demon', phonemically ) and ('without', phonemically ) are pronounced identically in isolation as . The presence of this process in Russian is also the source of the seemingly variant transliterations of Russian names into -off (Russian: ), especially by the French, as well as older English transcriptions.
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Achmat is the fairly standard transliteration used by South Africa's Muslim community, and its pronunciation shows evidence of the influence of Afrikaans: the which represents ح [ħ] is pronounced as an Afrikaans [x] (i.e. closer to the Arabic خ); and the د [d] is realised as a [t] (closer to the Arabic ت) which follows Afrikaans Final-obstruent devoicing principles.
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Yiddish phonology is similar to that of Standard German. However, it does not have final-obstruent devoicing and fortis (voiceless) stop consonants are unaspirated, and the phoneme is invariably uvular, unlike the German phoneme , which is palatal, velar, or uvular. Yiddish has a smaller inventory of vowels than Standard German, lacking vowel length distinction and the front rounded vowels ö and ü.
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The phonemic template of a syllable in Finnish is CVC, in which C can be an obstruent or a liquid consonant. V can be realized as a doubled vowel or a diphthong. A final consonant of a Finnish word, though not a syllable, must be a coronal one. Originally Finnish syllables could not start with two consonants but many loans containing these have added this to the inventory.
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The standard pronunciation of is ). Another common merger is that of at the end of a syllable with or , for instance ('war'), but ('wars'); ('he lay'), but ('we lay'). This pronunciation is frequent all over central and northern Germany. It is characteristic of regional languages and dialects, particularly Low German in the North, where represents a fricative, becoming voiceless in the syllable coda, as is common in German (final- obstruent devoicing).
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Irish, like Manx and colloquial Scottish Gaelic, uses two mutations on consonants: lenition ( [ˈʃeː.vʲuː]) and eclipsis ( [ˈʊ.ɾˠuː]) (the alternative names, aspiration for lenition and nasalisation for eclipsis, are also used, but those terms are misleading). Originally these mutations were phonologically governed external sandhi effects: lenition was caused by a consonant being between two vowels, and eclipsis when a nasal preceded an obstruent, including at the beginning of a word.
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In linguistics, a tenuis consonant ( or ) is an obstruent that is voiceless, unaspirated and unglottalized. In other words, it has the "plain" phonation of with a voice onset time close to zero (a zero-VOT consonant), as Spanish p, t, ch, k or English p, t, k after s (spy, sty, sky). For most languages, the distinction is relevant only for stops and affricates. However, a few languages have analogous series for fricatives.
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The glottal stop occurs only adjacent to a vowel, and, within words, it does not follow any obstruent except (the prefix) /s/. It can never occur in final position following a schwa. /h/ occurs only before vowels, following a resonant or one of the fricatives at morpheme boundaries, but never following other obstruents. It can appear between an unstressed and a stressed vowel, but it cannot occur between a stressed and an unstressed vowel.
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Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consonants usually involves complete closure of the glottis; another way to describe this phenomenon is to say that a glottal stop is made simultaneously with another consonant. In certain cases, the glottal stop can even wholly replace the voiceless consonant.
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The Inuit languages Greenlandic and Inuktitut either orthographize or transliterate their voiced uvular obstruent as . In Greenlandic, this phoneme is , while in Inuktitut it is . This spelling was convenient because these languages do not have non-lateral liquid consonants, and guttural realizations of are common in various languages, particularly the colonial languages Danish and French. But the Alaskan Inupiat language writes its phoneme instead as , reserving for its retroflex phoneme, which Greenlandic and Inuktitut do not have.
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Some European languages, for example Russian and Irish, contrast a palatalized lateral–rhotic pair with an unpalatalized (or velarized) set (e.g. in Russian). Elsewhere in the world, two liquids of the types mentioned above remains the most common attribute of a language's consonant inventory except in North America and Australia. In North America, a majority of languages do not have rhotics at all and there is a wide variety of lateral sounds though most are obstruent laterals rather than liquids.
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Every phoneme except "o" and "h" can occur initially, medially, or finally; "o" and "h" are never word-final. Clusters of two obstruents, geminate consonant pairs, and clusters of a sonorant followed by an obstruent are all common. Consonant clusters ending in a sonorant usually don't occur except in geminate pairs or when they occur initially through the use of one of the personal pronoun prefixes. Clusters of three consonants can occur, and are almost always of the form CsC.
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Features shared with German include the survival of two to three grammatical genders—albeit with few grammatical consequences—as well as the use of modal particles, final- obstruent devoicing, and a similar word order. Dutch vocabulary is mostly Germanic and incorporates slightly more Romance loans than German but far fewer than English. As with German, the vocabulary of Dutch also has strong similarities with the continental Scandinavian languages, but is not mutually intelligible in text or speech with any of them.
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Where a voiced obstruent or comes into contact with , the is absorbed into the other sound, which then becomes voiceless (in the case of , devoicing is to ). Devoicing is found most prominently in the future of first conjugation verbs (where the sound is represented by the letter f) and in the formation of verbal adjectives (where the sound is spelled th). For example, the verb ('sweep') ends in the voiced consonant , but its future tense ('will sweep') and verbal adjective ('swept') have the voiceless consonant .
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Tone distinctions in Yabem appear to be of relatively recent origin (Bradshaw 1979) and still correlate strongly with obstruent voicing contrasts (but not in its closest relative, Bukawa). Only high tones occur in syllables with voiceless obstruents (p, t, k), and only low tone occurs in syllables with voiced obstruents (b, d, g). The fricative /s/ is voiced in low-tone syllables but voiceless in high-tone syllables. Other phonemes are neutral with respect to tone and so occur in both high-tone or low-tone environments.
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In some treatments, complex clicks are posited to have airstream contours, in which the airstream changes between the front (click) and rear (non-click) release. There are two attested types: Linguo-pulmonic consonants, where the rear release is a uvular obstruent such as or ; and linguo-glottalic consonants, where the rear release is an ejective such as or . Theoretically, a release into an implosive should be possible, but both clicks and dorsal implosives () are rare (the latter because they are difficult to pronounce), and no language is known to combine them.
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A summary of the two-consonant clusters available in non-mutation environments A summary of the two-consonant clusters available in mutation environments Irish words can begin with clusters of two or three consonants. In general, all the consonants in a cluster agree in their quality, i.e. either all are broad or all are slender. Two-consonant clusters consist of an obstruent consonant followed by a liquid or nasal consonant (however, labial obstruents may not be followed by a nasal); examples (from ) include ('milking'), ('fine'), ('button'), ('law'), ('usual'), ('idiot'), ('slice'), ('snow'), ('poker'), and ('long for').
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The most salient dialectal difference in rimes is perhaps the lack of the obstruent codas , , in most dialects of Mandarin and independently in the Wencheng dialect of Oujiang, though this has traditionally been seen as a loss of tone (see below). In Wu, Min (generally), New Xiang (Hunanese), Jin, and in the Lower Yangtze and Minjiang dialects of Mandarin, these codas conflate to glottal stop . In others, such as Gan, they are reduced to , while Yue dialects, Hakka, and Old Xiang maintain the original system. Nasal codas are also reduced in many dialects.
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In phonetics and phonology, nonexplosive stops are posited class of non- pulmonic ("non-obstruent") stop consonants that lack the pressure build-up and burst release associated with pulmonic stops, but also the laryngeal lowering of implosive stops. They are reported to occur in Ikwere, an Igboid (Niger–Congo) language of Nigeria. Ikwere's two nonexplosive stops, transcribed as voiced and pre-glottalized , are reflexes of labial-velars and , respectively, in most other Igboid languages, and to implosives and in some varieties of Igbo. Ikwere's stops resemble both, in that they are velarized and have a non-pulmonic airstream mechanism.
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Nganʼgi is a non-Pama-Nyungan language with strong head-marking properties. It has 31 finite verbs, which combine with a large class of coverbs to form morphologically complex verb words with the type of information requiring a sentence to convey in English (including information about the subject, the object and other participants). Nganʼgi also has a system of 16 noun classes (including bound prefixes and free words), which exhibit agreement properties on modifying words. Nganʼgi also has sound features which are unusual by Australian standards, including a three-way obstruent contrast; it has two series of stops, as well as phonemic fricatives.
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At more or less the same time the Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law, moving over Western Europe from west to east, led to the development of Old English (or Anglo- Saxon), Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Hardly influenced by either development, Old Dutch remained close to the original language of the Franks, the people that would rule Europe for centuries. The language did however experience developments of its own, such as very early final-obstruent devoicing. In fact, the find at Bergakker indicates that the language may already have experienced this shift during the Old Frankish period.
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English does not have phonological final- obstruent devoicing of the type that neutralizes phonemic contrasts; thus pairs like bad and bat are distinct in all major accents of English. Nevertheless, voiced obstruents are devoiced to some extent in final position in English, especially when phrase-final or when followed by a voiceless consonant (for example, bad cat ). Old English had final devoicing of , although the spelling did not distinguish and . It can be inferred from the modern pronunciation of half with a voiceless , from an originally voiced fricative in Proto-Germanic (preserved in German and Gothic ).
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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.
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The most common type of palatal consonant is the extremely common approximant , which ranks as among the ten most common sounds in the world's languages. The nasal is also common, occurring in around 35 percent of the world's languages,Ian Maddieson (with a chapter contributed by Sandra Ferrari Disner); Patterns of sounds; Cambridge University Press, 1984. in most of which its equivalent obstruent is not the stop , but the affricate . Only a few languages in northern Eurasia, the Americas and central Africa contrast palatal stops with postalveolar affricates - as in Hungarian, Czech, Latvian, Macedonian, Slovak, Turkish and Albanian.
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There was the matter of personal taste, and many writers thought it was more aesthetic to follow French or Latin practice, leading to sometimes rather unusual spellings. The spelling was generally phonetic, and words were written based on how they were spoken rather than based on underlying phonemes or morphology. Final-obstruent devoicing was reflected in the spelling, and clitic pronouns and articles were frequently joined to the preceding or following word. Scribes wrote in their own dialect, and their spelling reflected the pronunciation of that particular scribe or of some prestige dialect by which the scribe was influenced.
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Obstruent-only syllables also occur phonetically in some prosodic situations when unstressed vowels elide between obstruents, as in potato and today , which do not change in their number of syllables despite losing a syllabic nucleus. A few languages have so-called syllabic fricatives, also known as fricative vowels, at the phonemic level. (In the context of Chinese phonology, the related but non-synonymous term apical vowel is commonly used.) Mandarin Chinese is famous for having such sounds in at least some of its dialects, for example the pinyin syllables sī shī rī, sometimes pronounced respectively. Though, like the nucleus of rhotic English church, there is debate over whether these nuclei are consonants or vowels.
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Prenasalized consonants are phonetic sequences of a nasal and an obstruent (or occasionally a non-nasal sonorant such as ) that behave phonologically like single consonants. The primary reason for considering them to be single consonants, rather than clusters as in English finger or member, lies in their behaviour; however, there may also be phonetic correlates which distinguish prenasalized consonants from clusters. Because of the additional difficulty in both articulation and timing, prenasalized fricatives and sonorants are not as common as prenasalized stops or affricates, and the presence of the former implies the latter. In most languages, when a prenasalized consonant is described as "voiceless", it is only the oral portion that is voiceless, and the nasal portion is modally voiced.
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There are no perfect minimal pairs to contrast and , and because doesn't appear in the final syllable of a prosodic word, there are no monosyllabic words with ; exceptions might include voal ('veil') and trotuar ('sidewalk'), though Ioana Chițoran argues that these are best treated as containing glide-vowel sequences rather than diphthongs. In addition to these, the semivowels and can be combined (either before, after, or both) with most vowels, while this arguablySee for a brief overview of the views regarding Romanian semivowels forms additional diphthongs and triphthongs, only and can follow an obstruent-liquid cluster such as in broască ('frog') and dreagă ('to mend'), implying that and are restricted to the syllable boundary and therefore, strictly speaking, do not form diphthongs.
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Such phonological rules may continue to apply for an indefinite amount of time. Final-obstruent devoicing in Dutch, for example, has been a phonological rule since Old Dutch, over 1000 years ago. The Germanic spirant law may have been formed as part of Grimm's law long before written records began, but it ceased to operate shortly after the Germanic languages began to separate, around the middle of the 1st millennium AD. Sometimes, sound changes occur that directly violate a surface filter, which may cause it to cease operating. Sievers' law presumably lost relevance in the West Germanic languages after the operation of the West Germanic gemination since it eliminated the contrast between light and heavy syllables, at the core of the law's operation.
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Final obstruent devoicing is the full devoicing of final obstruents that occurs for some AAVE speakers in Detroit where obstruents are devoiced at the end of a word. The preceding length of the vowel is maintained when the final obstruents are devoiced in AAVE: and for "big" and "bad". Most varieties of English do not have full devoicing of final voiced obstruents, but voiced obstruents are partially devoiced in final position in English, especially when they are phrase-final or when they are followed by a voiceless consonant (for example, bad cat ). The most salient distinction between bad and bat is not the voicing of the final consonant but the duration of the vowel and the possible glottalization of final : bad is pronounced while bat is .
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Similar considerations apply to languages with final obstruent devoicing, in which the isolation form undergoes loss of voicing contrast, but other forms may not. If the grammar of a language is assumed to have two rules, rule A and rule B, with A ordered before B, a given derivation may cause the application of rule A to create the environment for rule B to apply, which was not present before the application of rule A. Both rules then are in a feeding relationship. If rule A is ordered before B in the derivation in which rule A destroys the environment to which rule B applies, both rules are in a bleeding order. If A is ordered before B, and B creates an environment in which A could have applied, B is then said to counterfeed A, and the relationship is counterfeeding.
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The nasalisation of vowels and consonants in Mixtec is an interesting phenomenon that has had various analyses. All of the analyses agree that nasalization is contrastive and that it is somewhat restricted. In most varieties, it is clear that nasalization is limited to the right edge of a morpheme (such as a noun or verb root), and spreads leftward until it is blocked by an obstruent (plosive, affricate or fricative in the list of Mixtec consonants). A somewhat more abstract analysis of the Mixtec facts claims that the spreading of nasalization is responsible for the surface "contrast" between two kinds of bilabials ( and , with and without the influence of nasalization, respectively), between two kinds of palatals ( and nasalized —often less accurately (but more easily) transcribed as —with and without nasalization, respectively), and even two kinds of coronals ( and , with and without nasalization, respectively).
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A distinction is often made between so-called normative and non-normative preaspiration: in a language with normative preaspiration of certain voiceless obstruents, the preaspiration is obligatory even though it is not a distinctive feature; in a language with non-normative preaspiration, the preaspiration can be phonetically structured for those who use it, but it is non-obligatory, and may not appear with all speakers. Preaspirated consonants are typically in free variation with spirant-stop clusters, though they may also have a relationship (synchronically and diachronically) with long vowels or -stop clusters. Preaspiration can take a number of different forms; while the most usual is glottal friction (an -like sound), the precise phonetic quality can be affected by the obstruent or the preceding vowel, becoming for example after close vowels; other potential realizations include and even . Preaspiration is very unstable both synchronically and diachronically and is often replaced by a fricative or by a lengthening of the preceding vowel.
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Phonologically Sylheti is distinguished from standard Bengali and other regional varieties by significant deaspiration and spirantization,"One of the properties that distinguish Sylheti from SCB or other regional varieties is the significant application of obstruent weakening involving de-aspiration and spirantization." leading to major restructuring of the consonant inventory"Consequently, the consonant inventory (especially the obstruents), of Sylheti exhibit a major reduction and restructuring compared to that of (Standard Colloquial Bengali)." and the development of tones."Also noteworthy is the development of tones due to loss of the breathiness and aspiration contrast." Although Grierson had classified Sylheti as an Eastern Bengali dialect, he had identified Sylheti sharing some features with Assamese including a larger set of inflections than Bengali. Particularly in the United Kingdom, the majority of the diaspora using Sylheti as the main vernacular has led some to view it as a distinct language, due to an environment that was somewhat uninfluenced by standard Bengali.
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