In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from gemini 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant.William Ham, Phonetic and Phonological Aspects of Geminate Timing, p. 1–18 Some phonological theories use 'doubling' as a synonym for gemination, while others describe two distinct phenomena.
Consonant length is a distinctive feature in certain languages, such as Japanese. Other languages, such as Modern Greek, do not have word-internal phonemic consonant geminates.
Consonant gemination and vowel length are independent in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Hungarian, Malayalam, and Finnish; however, in languages like Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish, vowel length and consonant length are interdependent. For example, in Norwegian and Swedish, a geminated consonant is always preceded by a short vowel, while an ungeminated consonant is preceded by a long vowel. In Italian, a vowel is long when in a stressed non-word-final open syllable; thus, a geminated consonant is always preceded by a short vowel since it closes the preceding syllable, while a long vowel is always followed by an ungeminated consonant.
Phonetics Lengthened fricatives, nasals, laterals, approximants and trills are simply prolonged. In lengthened stops, the obstruction of the airway is prolonged, which delays release, and the closure is lengthened. That is, is pronounced , not *. In affricates, it is also the closure that is lengthened, not the fricative release. That is, is pronounced , not *.Joshua Wilbur (2014) A Grammar of Pite Saami, p 47
In terms of consonant duration, Berber and Finnish are reported to have a 3-to-1 ratio, compared with around 2-to-1 (or lower) in Japanese, (URL is author's "near final version" draft) Italian, and Turkish.
Phonology Gemination of consonants is distinctive in some languages and then is subject to various phonological constraints that depend on the language.
In some languages, like Italian, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic, and Luganda, consonant length and vowel length depend on each other. A short vowel within a stressed syllable almost always precedes a long consonant or a consonant cluster, and a long vowel must be followed by a short consonant. In Classical Arabic, a long vowel was lengthened even more before permanently-geminate consonants.
In other languages, such as Finnish, consonant length and vowel length are independent of each other. In Finnish, both are phonemic; 'back', 'fireplace' and 'burden' are different, unrelated words. Finnish consonant length is also affected by consonant gradation. Another important phenomenon is sandhi, which produces long consonants at word boundaries when there is an archiphonemic glottal stop > 'take it (imperative)!'.
In addition, in some Finnish compound words, if the initial word ends in an , the initial consonant of the following word is geminated: 'trash bag' , 'welcome' . In certain cases, a after a is geminated by most people: 'screw' , 'baby' . In the Tampere dialect, if a word receives gemination of after , the is often deleted ( , ), and 'Saturday', for example, receives a medial , which can in turn lead to deletion of ().
Distinctive consonant length is usually restricted to certain consonants and environments. There are very few languages that have initial consonant length; among those that do are Pattani Malay, Chuukese, Moroccan Arabic, a few Romance languages such as Sicilian and Neapolitan, as well as many High Alemannic German dialects, such as that of Thurgovia. Some African languages, such as Setswana and Luganda, also have initial consonant length: it is very common in Luganda and indicates certain grammatical features. In colloquial Finnish and Italian, long consonants occur in specific instances as sandhi phenomena.
The difference between singleton and geminate consonants varies within and across languages. Sonorants show more distinct geminate-to-singleton ratios while sibilants have less distinct ratios. The bilabial and alveolar geminates are generally longer than velar ones.
The reverse of gemination reduces a long consonant to a short one, which is called degemination. It is a pattern in Baltic-Finnic consonant gradation that the strong grade (often the nominative) form of the word is degeminated into a weak grade (often all the other cases) form of the word: > (burden, of the burden). As a historical restructuring at the phonemic level, word-internal long consonants degeminated in Western Romance languages: e.g. Spanish /ˈboka/ 'mouth' vs. Italian /ˈbokka/, both of which evolved from Latin /ˈbukka/.
Examples
Afroasiatic languages
Arabic
Written Arabic indicates gemination with a diacritic () shaped like a lowercase Greek omega or a rounded Latin w, called the : . Written above the consonant that is to be doubled, the is often used to disambiguate words that differ only in the doubling of a consonant where the word intended is not clear from the context. For example, in Arabic, Form I verbs and Form II verbs differ only in the doubling of the middle consonant of the triliteral root in the latter form, e. g., (with full diacritics: ) is a Form I verb meaning to study, whereas (with full diacritics: ) is the corresponding Form II verb, with the middle consonant doubled, meaning to teach.
Berber
In Berber, each consonant has a geminate counterpart, and gemination is lexically contrastive. The distinction between single and geminate consonants is attested in medial position as well as in absolute initial and final positions.
'say' 'those in question' 'earth, soil' 'loss' 'mouth' 'mother' 'hyena' 'he was quiet' 'pond, lake, oasis' 'brown buzzard, hawk'
In addition to lexical geminates, Berber also has phonologically-derived and morphologically-derived geminates. Phonological alternations can surface by concatenation (e.g., 'give him two!') or by complete assimilation (e.g. 'he will touch you'). Morphological alternations include imperfective gemination, with some Berber verbs forming their imperfective stem by geminating one consonant in their perfective stem (e.g., 'go! PF', 'go! IMPF'), as well as quantity alternations between singular and plural forms (e.g., 'hand', 'hands').
Hebrew
In Tiberian Hebrew, all consonants except gutturals and (Resh) can receive a dot called a dagesh ḥazak, placed inside the letter: it means the letter has been functionally geminated/doubled (whether or not this was vocalized in speech). This happens following the morphological / grammatical rules of gemination.
In Modern Hebrew:
in writing, the same rules of (functional) gemination apply, although the resultant dagesh ḥazak dots are only visible in pointed texts where diacritics are written: in texts for children or new immigrants to Israel, or in specialized texts like dictionaries and poetry. Like all Hebrew diacritics, they are still functionally present even when they are hidden in unpointed texts. As a result, they can still influence pronunciation. in speech, vocal gemination itself (the articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time) is generally not pronounced. However, the rules of gemination, which determine when a dagesh ḥazak is placed inside a letter which is functionally doubled, still influence pronunciation in one respect: if a dagesh ḥazak (visible or not, whether the text is pointed or not) is present in bet, kaf, and pe, it turns a fricative sound (vet, khaf, and fe) into a plosive sound (bet, kaf, and pe); in all other letters, it has no influence on the letter's pronunciation. Example: according to the rules of the dagesh ḥazak, the definite article "the" causes the next letter to be functionally geminated: in ("everything", literally "the all"), the is geminated (it has a dagesh ḥazak dot inside it), and is thus pronounced . On the other hand, the preposition "in, with, by" does not cause the next letter to be geminated, so in "in all, by all", the is not geminated (no dagesh ḥazak dot inside it), and is thus pronounced . This illustrates how the rules of gemination influence pronunciation in modern Hebrew. The difference between the geminated and the ungeminated would not be visible in a regular, unpointed text ( would appear in both cases), but the letters would still be pronounced differently.
Austronesian languages Austronesian languages in the Philippines, Micronesia, and Sulawesi are known to have geminate consonants.Blust, Robert. (2013). The Austronesian Languages (Rev. ed.). Australian National University.
Kavalan The Formosan language Kavalan makes use of gemination to mark intensity, as in 'bad' vs. 'very bad'.
Malay dialects Word-initial gemination occurs in various Malay dialects, particularly those found on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula such as Kelantan-Pattani Malay and Terengganu Malay. Gemination in these dialects of Malay occurs for various purposes such as:
To form a shortened free variant of a word or phrase so that: > 'give' > 'to/at/from the shore' A replacement of reduplication for its various uses (e.g. to denote plural, to form a different word, etc.) in Standard Malay so that: > 'children' > 'kite'
Tuvaluan The Polynesian language Tuvaluan allows for word-initial geminates, such as 'overcooked'.
Indo-European languages
English In English phonology, consonant length is not distinctive within root words. For instance, baggage is pronounced , not . However, phonetic gemination does occur marginally.
Gemination is found across words and across morphemes when the last consonant in a given word and the first consonant in the following word are the same fricative, nasal, or stop.
For instance: b: subbasement d: midday f: life force g: egg girl k: bookkeeper l: wholly (cf. holy) m: calm man or roommate (in some dialects) or prime minister n: evenness p: lamppost (compare lamb post, compost) r: interregnum or fire road s: misspell or this saddle sh: fish shop t: cat tail th: both thighs v: live voter z: pays zero
With affricates, however, this does not occur. For instance: orange juice
In most instances, the absence of this doubling does not affect the meaning, though it may confuse the listener momentarily. The following minimal pairs represent examples where the doubling does affect the meaning in most accents:
ten nails versus ten ales this sin versus this inn five valleys versus five alleys his zone versus his own mead day versus me-day unnamed versus unaimed forerunner versus foreigner
Note that whenever appears (in brackets), non-rhotic dialects of English don't have the gemination, but rather lengthen the preceding vowel.
In some dialects gemination is also found for some (not all) words when the suffix -ly follows a root ending in , as in solely , but not in usually .
In some varieties of Welsh English, the process takes place indiscriminately between vowels, e.g. in money but it also applies with graphemic duplication (thus, orthographically dictated), e.g. butter .Crystal, David (2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, p. 335
French
In French, gemination is usually not phonologically relevant and therefore does not allow words to be distinguished: it mostly corresponds to an accent of insistence ( realised ), or meets hyper-correction criteria: one "corrects" one's pronunciation, despite the usual phonology, to be closer to a realization that one imagines to be more correct: thus, the word illusion is sometimes pronounced by influence of the spelling.