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Concept
Icelandic phonology
Summary
Unlike many languages, Icelandic has only very minor dialectal differences in sounds. The language has both monophthongs and diphthongs, and many consonants can be voiced or unvoiced.
Icelandic has an aspiration contrast between plosives, rather than a voicing contrast, similar to Faroese, Danish and Standard Mandarin. Preaspirated voiceless stops are also common. However, fricative and sonorant consonant phonemes exhibit regular contrasts in voice, including in nasals (rare in the world's languages). Additionally, length is contrastive for consonants, but not vowels. In Icelandic, the main stress is always on the first syllable.
The number and nature of the consonant phonemes in modern Icelandic is subject to broad disagreement, due to a complex relationship among consonant allophones.
Even the number of major allophones is subject to some dispute, although less than for phonemes. The following is a chart of potentially contrastive phones (important phonetic distinctions which minimally contrast in some positions with known phonemes; not a chart of actual phonemes), according to one analysis :
{| class="wikitable" style="margin: 1em auto 1em auto; text-align: center;"
|+Consonant phones
! colspan="2" |
! colspan="2" | Labial
! colspan="2" | Coronal
! colspan="2" | Palatal
! colspan="2" | Velar
! Glottal
|-
! colspan="2" | Nasal
| style="border-right: 0;" | m̥ || style="border-left: 0;" | m
| style="border-right: 0;" | n̥ || style="border-left: 0;" | n
| style="border-right: 0;" | ɲ̊ || style="border-left: 0;" | ɲ
| style="border-right: 0;" | ŋ̊ || style="border-left: 0;" | ŋ
|
|-
! colspan="2" | Stop
| style="border-right: 0;" | ph || style="border-left: 0;" | p
| style="border-right: 0;" | th || style="border-left: 0;" | t̪
| style="border-right: 0;" | ch || style="border-left: 0;" | c
| style="border-right: 0;" | kh || style="border-left: 0;" | k
|
|-
! rowspan="2" | Continuant
! sibilant
| colspan="2" |
| style="border-right: 0;" | s̺ || style="border-left: 0;" |
| colspan="2" |
| colspan="2" |
|
|-
! non-sibilant
| style="border-right: 0;" | f || style="border-left: 0;" | v
| style="border-right: 0;" | θ̠ || style="border-left: 0;" | ð̠
| style="border-right: 0;" | ç || style="border-left: 0;" | j
| style="border-right: 0;" | x || style="border-left: 0;" | ɣ
| h
|-
! colspan="2" | Lateral
| colspan="2" |
| style="border-right: 0;"| l̥ || style="border-left: 0;" | l
| colspan="2" |
| colspan="2" |
|
|-
! colspan="2" | Rhotic
| colspan="2" |
| style="border-right: 0;" | r̥ || style="border-left: 0;" | r
| colspan="2" |
| colspan="2" |
|
|}
/n̥, n, l̥, l/ are alveolar [n̥, n, l̥, l], whereas /th, t/ are dental [t̪h, t̪].
Official source
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