This article is about the phonology of Latvian. It deals with synchronic phonology as well as phonetics.
Consonants Table adopted from
Labial Dental/Alveolar Palatal/Postalveolar Velar Nasal Stop Affricate Fricative () () Approximant Trill ()
are denti-alveolar, while are alveolar. The consonant sounds are only found in loanwords. is only an allophone of nasals before velars and . Latvian plosives are not aspirated (unlike in English). Voiced and voiceless consonants assimilate to the subsequent consonant, e.g. or . Consonants can be short or long; long consonants are represented with double letters in the orthography: . Plosives and fricatives that occur between two short vowels are lengthened, as in , and words spelt with ⟨zs⟩, pronounced as , or ⟨šs⟩ or ⟨žs⟩, both pronounced as [ʃː]. A palatalized dental trill is still used in some dialects (mainly outside Latvia) but quite rarely, and hence the letter was removed from the alphabet.
Vowels Latvian has six vowels, with length as distinctive feature: + Latvian vowels Front Central Back short long short long short long Close Close-mid Open-mid () () Near-open Open , and the diphthongs involving it other than , are confined to loanwords.
The vowel length ratio is about 1:2.5. Vowel length is phonemic and plays an important role in the language. For example, means 'made of wood', means 'on the tree'; means 'a drop', and means 'a duck'.
Latvian also has 10 diphthongs (), although some diphthongs are mostly limited to proper names and interjections.
Pitch accent Standard Latvian and, with a few minor exceptions, all of the Latvian dialects, have fixed initial stress.On the possible origins of fixed initial stress in Latvian, in contrast to Lithuanian, see Long vowels and diphthongs have a tone, regardless of their position in the word. This includes the so-called "mixed diphthongs", composed of a short vowel followed by a sonorant. There are three types of tones: level (also drawling, sustained) tone () denoted by a tilde [ ̃] high throughout the syllable e.g., ('spring onion') falling tone () denoted by a grave accent [ ̀] brief rise followed by a long fall e.g., ('arch') broken tone (lauztā intonācija) denoted by a circumflex [ ̂] rising tone followed by falling tone with interruption in the middle or some creakiness in the voice e.g., ('window')
Besides the three-tone system of the standard variety, there are also Latvian dialects with only two tones: in western Latvia, the broken tone has merged into the falling tone. In eastern Latvia the level tone has merged into the falling tone. Hence, the Central Latvian , , correspond to Western Latvian , , , and to Eastern Latvian , , .
This system is phonetically more or less similar to the ones found in Lithuanian, Swedish, Norwegian and Serbo-Croatian. The broken tone has some similarity to the Danish stød.
Alternations Latvian roots may alternate between and depending on whether the following segment is a vowel or a consonant. For example, the root ('Daugava River') in the nominative case is , but is pronounced in the city name . In this example, the vocalic alternant is realized as the off-glide of the diphthong . However, when following a vowel that does not form an attested Latvian diphthong (for example, ), is pronounced as a monophthong, as in ('fish-NOM.SG.'; cf. 'fish-NOM.PL.').
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References