Faroese phonology

Faroese has a sound system similar to closely related Icelandic, including such features as an aspiration contrast in stop consonants and a lack of vowel length contrasts rare among Germanic languages.

Vowels
As with other Germanic languages, Faroese has a large number of vowels; Depending on analysis, long and short vowels may be considered separate phonemes, with 26 in total. Vowel distribution is similar to other North Germanic languages in that short vowels appear in closed syllables (those ending in consonant clusters or long consonants) and long vowels appearing in open syllables. provides the following alternations:

Faroese avoids having a hiatus between two vowels by inserting a glide between them.

There is considerable variation among dialects in the pronunciation of vowels.

The only unstressed vowels in Faroese are short ; these appear in inflectional endings: áðrenn (e.g. 'before'). Very typical are endings like -ur, -ir, -ar. The dative is often indicated by.
 * – bátar (boats), kallar  ((you) call, (he) calls)
 * – gestir (guests), dugir  ((you, he) can)
 * – bátur (boat), gentur  (girls), rennur  ((you) run, (he) runs).

In some dialects, unstressed short ` is realized as or is reduced further to. goes under a similar reduction pattern so unstressed and  can rhyme. This can cause spelling mistakes related to these two vowels. The following table displays the different realizations in different dialects.

Skerping
The so-called "skerping" ( 'sharpening') is a typical phenomenon of fronting back vowels before and monophthongizing certain diphthongs before long. Skerping is not indicated orthographically.
 * Jógvan (a form of the name John), Gjógv  ('cleft')
 * kúgv ('cow'), trúgva  ('believe'), but: trúleysur  ('faithless')
 * heyggjur ('high'), but heygnum  ('high [dat. sg.]')
 * nýggjur ('new [M.]'), but nýtt  ('New [Nn.]')
 * beiggi ('brother')
 * oyggj ('island'), but oynna  ('island [acc. sg.]')

Consonants

 * are normally labiodental.
 * Intervocalic is normally an approximant, whereas word-initial  varies between an approximant  and a fricative.
 * is dental, whereas vary between being dental  and (less commonly) alveolar.
 * Initial is dental  or alveolar . Postvocalic  may be somewhat retracted alveolar, especially after back vowels.
 * are palato-alveolar, and vary between stops and affricates.
 * are velar, whereas is glottal.

There are several phonological processes involved in Faroese, including:


 * Liquids are devoiced before voiceless consonants
 * Nasals generally assume the place of articulation and laryngeal settings of following consonants.
 * Velar stops palatalize to postalveolar affricates before.
 * becomes before voiceless consonants
 * becomes after  and before
 * retroflexes itself as well as following consonants in consonant clusters, yielding the allophones while  itself becomes, example: $⟨rd⟩$ ; preaspirated consonats devoice the rhotic: example: $⟨rt⟩$
 * Pre-occlusion of original $\langlell\rangle$ to and $\langlenn\rangle$ to.
 * Intervocalically the aspirated consonants become pre-aspirated unless followed by a closed vowel. In clusters, the preaspiration merges with a preceding nasal or apical approximant, rendering them voiceless, example: $⟨nt⟩$

Omissions in consonant clusters
Faroese tends to omit the first or second consonant in clusters of different consonants:
 * fjals (mountain's gen.) instead of  from  (nom.). Other examples for genitives are: barns  (child's), vatns  (lake's, water's).
 * hjálpti (helped) past sg. instead of  from hjálpa . Other examples for past forms are: sigldi  (sailed), yrkti  (wrote poetry).
 * homophone are fylgdi (followed) and fygldi (caught birds with net):.
 * skt will be:
 * in words of more than one syllable: føroyskt (Faroese n. sg.;) russiskt  (Russian n. sg.), íslendskt  (Icelandic n. sg.).
 * in monosyllables: enskt (English n. sg.), danskt  (Danish n. sg.), franskt  (French n. sg.), spanskt  (Spanish n. sg.), svenskt  (Swedish n. sg.), týskt  (German n. sg.).
 * However in: írskt  (Irish n. sg.), norskt  (Norwegian ''n. sg.)