Slovene phonology

This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the Slovene language.

Consonants
Slovene has 21 distinctive consonant phonemes. Conditional allophones are shown in parentheses.


 * are bilabial, whereas are labiodental.
 * and are dental, i.e.  are laminal denti-alveolar, while  and  are dentalized laminal alveolar, pronounced with the blade of the tongue very close to the upper front teeth, with the tip of the tongue resting behind lower front teeth.
 * are alveolar. The first two are laminal denti-alveolar before dental consonants, unless  is vocalized to . In addition,  is velar  before velar consonants, and it merges with  to a labiodental  before labiodental consonants.
 * In Standard Slovene, is always clear.
 * There is not a full agreement about the realization of :
 * consider it to be an alveolar tap.
 * states that it varies between an alveolar trill and alveolar tap . Throughout the book, he uses the latter symbol.
 * consider it to be an alveolar trill.
 * In some dialects close to the Austrian border, is realized as uvular fricative . In Standard Slovene, this realization is considered to be a speech impediment.
 * are palato-alveolar, but they can be laminal retroflex for some speakers, particularly those living close to the Croatian border.

All voiced obstruents are devoiced at the end of words unless immediately followed by a word beginning with a vowel or a voiced consonant. In consonant clusters, voicing distinction is neutralized and all consonants assimilate the voicing of the rightmost segment. In this context,, and  may occur as voiced allophones of ,  and , respectively (e.g. vŕh drevésa ).

has several allophones depending on context.
 * Before a vowel, pronunciation is labiodental, (also described as ).
 * After a vowel, pronunciation is bilabial and forms a diphthong.
 * At the beginning of a syllable, before a consonant (for example in vsi "all"), the pronunciation varies more widely by speaker and area. Many speakers convert into a full vowel  in this position.  For those speakers that retain a consonantal pronunciation, it is pronounced  before a voiced consonant and  before a voiceless consonant.  Thus, vsi may be pronounced as disyllabic  or monosyllabic.

The preposition v is always bound to the following word; however its phonetic realization follows the normal phonological rules for.

The sequences, and  occur only before a vowel. Before a consonant or word-finally, they are reduced to, and  respectively. This is reflected in the spelling in the case of, but not for and.

Under certain (somewhat unpredictable) circumstances, at the end of a syllable may become, merging with the allophone of  in that position.

Vowels


Slovene has an eight-vowel (according to Peter Jurgec nine-vowel)  system, in comparison to the five-vowel system of Serbo-Croatian.

According to, is inserted epenthetically, and its distribution is fully predictable. He also says that "Descriptions of schwa distribution are offer in lexical rather than grammatical terms. These were also based on historical data and did not consider actual speech of educated speakers in Ljubljana, nowadays considered standard."

The dialectal distribution of vs. and vs. is inconsistent with the distribution in Standard Slovene. This influences the way speakers of such dialects speak Standard Slovene.

Slovene has been traditionally described as distinguishing vowel length, which correlates with stress and is therefore discussed in the prosody section, below. The distinction between and, and between  and  is only made when they are stressed and long. When short or unstressed, they are not distinguished: short stressed variants are realized as open-mid, while the unstressed variants have two realizations: lowered close-mid before a stressed syllable, and raised open-mid  after a stressed syllable.

In the colloquial spoken language, unstressed and most short stressed vowels tend to be reduced or elided. For example kȕp "heap" >, právimo "we say" >.

When non-prevocalic, the sequences and  are realized as, , i.e. with mid, rather than close-mid vowels.

Prosody
Scholars have found that vowel length in standard Slovene is no longer distinctive,  and that the only differences in vowel length are that the stressed vowels are longer than the unstressed ones, and that stressed open syllables are longer than stressed closed syllables. Stressed syllables are characterized by amplitude and pitch prominence.

In tonemic varieties, stressed syllables also have a distinction of phonemic tone (high or low).

All dialects of Slovene have phonemic stress, but the same word can be accented quite differently in different dialects. Most words have a single syllable that carries stress. Some compounds, but not all, have multiple stresses, inherited from the parts that make up the compound. There are also a few small words and clitics, including prepositions, that have no inherent stress at all and attach prosodically to another word.

In traditional pronunciation
In non-final syllables, quantitative accent (increased syllable length) is also present in almost all words. In tonemic varieties, stressed syllables also have a distinction of phonemic tone (high or low). Stress and vowel length are closely intertwined:


 * A non-final syllable that bears stress will automatically have a long vowel. Conversely, at most one vowel in a Slovene word is long, and it automatically bears the stress.
 * If a word has no long vowels, the stress usually falls on the final syllable. However, a limited number of words have non-final stress on short syllables.
 * The combination, although phonetically short, may be stressed and behaves as a long vowel in that case. In particular, it may carry tonal distinctions.
 * Schwa in other positions can also carry the stress, but does not have tonal distinctions and thus behaves as a short vowel.

Note that vowel length is clearly phonemic in stressed final syllables, which can be either long or short. In other syllables, however, whether vowel length or stress, or both, are phonemic depends on the underlying phonological analysis. Generally speaking, stress and length co-occur in all but the final syllable, so one feature or the other is phonetically redundant in those words.

Tone
The standard language has two varieties, tonemic and non-tonemic. These differ only in the presence of phonemic tonal distinctions on stressed syllables (i.e. pitch accent) in the former. Phonemic tone exists only in a north-south band of dialects in the center of the country (the Upper and Lower Carniolan dialect groups and part of the Carinthian dialect group). However, because the Slovenian capital city Ljubljana is located within the central tonemic dialect area, phonemic tone was included in the standard language, and in fact the tonemic variety is more prestigious and is universally used in formal TV and radio broadcasts.

The exact distribution and phonetic realization of tonemes varies locally. In Standard Slovene, some words with the traditionally long vowels may have either a high or low tone.

Unless otherwise noted, this article discusses the tonemes as they are realized in Standard Slovene spoken in Ljubljana.

In the tonemic variety, the following additional rules apply to stressed vowels (unstressed vowels never carry tonal distinction):


 * Long vowels as well as tautosyllabic stressed (i.e. stressed  not directly followed by a vowel in the same word) can bear either a high or low tone. (The terms falling or circumflex are sometimes used in place of high; likewise, rising or acute may be used in place of low.)
 * High-tone low-mid are uncommon.
 * Short vowels other than are always high-tone.
 * (when not part of a stressed combination) is normally tonemically high in final syllables and low elsewhere.

This leads to the following possible combinations of tone/length and vowel quality:

Note that tautosyllabic stressed behaves like a long vowel in terms of the tones it can bear, and in fact it is notated as such in the tonemic writing system (see below). Examples: pr̂stnica "phalange" (high tone) vs. pŕstanǝc "finger" (low tone). However, since it does not have any length distinction, it is equally valid to class it as a short vowel.

The non-tonemic system is identical to the tonemic system above in terms of vowel length and stress, but lacks any phonemic tone. This means that, for those dialects, the first and second rows merge, as do the third and fourth.

Similarly, for many  speakers who don't distinguish short and long vowels, the first and third rows merge, as do the second and fourth. An exception to this is the traditional, which does not merge with. Instead, the former is realized as.

Sample
The sample text is a reading of The North Wind and the Sun. The transcription is based on a recording of two speakers, a female and a male, from Ljubljana. It does not indicate tone.

Orthographic version
Severni veter in sonce sta se prepirala, kateri od njiju je močnejši, ko je mimo prišel popotnik, zavit v topel plašč. Dogovorila sta se, da bo veljal za močnejšega tisti, ki mu bo prvemu uspelo, da bo popotnik slekel svoj plašč. Severni veter je zapihal z vso močjo, toda bolj ko je pihal, bolj tesno je popotnik ovijal svoj plašč okoli sebe. Končno je Severni veter popustil. Nato je Sonce toplo posijalo in popotnik je takoj slekel svoj plašč. In tako je Severni veter moral priznati, da je Sonce močnejše od njega.