Does Danish have voiced fricatives?

Abstract

It is an open question whether Danish has voiced fricatives, whether at the phonetic level or the phonological level. The best candidates for being voiced fricatives are /v r/, which are sometimes described as being voiced fricatives at the phonological level, even though they are usually taken to be approximants at the phonetic level. In this article, we discuss the evidence for and against analysing /v r/ as voiced fricatives, including evidence from phonological processes, phonotactics, and language history. We also report the results from a pilot corpus study of the acoustics of /v r/, since we are not aware of any previous studies of the phonetics of /v r/. The phonological evidence consistently points to /v r/ being considered approximants, while the phonetic evidence suggests that (in simple onset position) /v/ is an approximant and /r/ is a variably voiced fricative. These results call for modelling within Boersma’s BiPhon framework of the phonetics-phonology interface for /r/.