Upper Sorbian phonology

This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the Upper Sorbian language.

Vowels
The vowel inventory of Upper Sorbian is exactly the same as that of Lower Sorbian. It is also very similar to the vowel inventory of Slovene.


 * Word-initial vowels are rare, and are often preceded by a non-phonemic glottal stop, or sometimes . never appear in word-initial position, whereas  appear in word-initial position only in recent borrowings.
 * is mid-centralized to after hard consonants.
 * are diphthongized to in slow speech.
 * has three allophones:
 * Open-mid between hard consonants and after a hard consonant;
 * Mid between soft consonants and after a soft consonant (excluding  in both cases);
 * Diphthong with a mid onset before.
 * has two allophones:
 * Diphthong with a mid onset before labial consonants;
 * Open-mid in all other cases.
 * The and  distinctions are weakened or lost in unstressed syllables.
 * is phonetically central . It is somewhat higher after soft consonants.

Consonants

 * are bilabial, whereas are labiodental.
 * are strongly palatalized.
 * is a somewhat velarized bilabial approximant, whereas (the soft counterpart of ) is a strongly palatalized bilabial approximant.
 * is very rare. Apart from loanwords, it occurs only in two Slavonic words: zełharny 'deceitful' and zełharnosć  'deceitfulness', both of which are derivatives of łhać  'to lie'. Usage of these words is typically restricted to the Bautzen dialect, as speakers of the Catholic dialect use łžeć  and its derivatives.
 * are alveolar, is strongly palatalized alveolar (alveolo-palatal) , whereas  are dental.
 * before (in case of  also before ) are weakly palatalized .  also reports palatalized allophones of, but without specifying the vowels before which they occur. Among these, the palatalized  are extremely rare.
 * are velar in front of velar consonants.
 * is very rare. In many cases, it merges with into.
 * are very rare. According to, the phonemic status of is controversial.
 * are either alveolar or uvular . According to, the alveolar realization is archaic.
 * Soft is strongly palatalized.
 * In most dialects, are palato-alveolar. This is unlike Lower Sorbian, where these consonants are retroflex  (Lower Sorbian  does not have a voiced counterpart). Retroflex realizations also occur in Upper Sorbian dialects spoken in some villages north of Hoyerswerda.
 * are velar, whereas is glottal.
 * An aspirated is a morpheme-initial allophone of  in some cases, as well as a possible word-initial allophone of.
 * does not occur word-initially, whereas does not occur word-finally.
 * is voiced, unlike Lower Sorbian where it is voiceless.
 * An epenthetic is inserted before a post-vocalic soft consonant, yielding a diphthong. If the soft consonant occurs before  or, it is often realized as hard, and  is lowered to.
 * In literary language, the contrast between hard and soft consonants is neutralized in word-final position. Word-finally, the letter $\langleń\rangle$ represents a post-vocalic sequence, as in dźeń 'day'.

Final devoicing and assimilation
Upper Sorbian has both final devoicing and regressive voicing assimilation, both word-internal and across word boundaries. In the latter context, is voiced to. Regressive voicing assimilation does not occur before sonorants and.

Stress

 * Words consisting of up to three syllables are stressed on the first syllable.
 * Foreign words, such as student 'student', preserve their original accent.