Luxembourgish

Source: Gilles, Peter & Jürgen Trouvain. 2013. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 43(1). 67–74.

Comments: Similar to Standard German, voiced obstruents cannot occur syllable-finally and will be devoiced (‘Auslautverhärtung’). Likewise, the voiceless plosives [p t k] are aspirated in most positions. The phonologically voiced plosives [b d ɡ] are in fact often realized as devoiced plosives. Thus, the phonological opposition is established by a fortis/lenis distinction... Among the fricatives, [χ] and [ɕ] are allophones of one single phoneme /χ/. The same holds for their voiced counterparts [ʁ] and [ʑ] with the latter allophone appearing only in a few words, however... From a phonemic perspective, the vowel /eː/ has two contextually conditioned allophones: when preceded by the vibrant /r/ in simplex words an open [ɛː] is realized (Kär [kɛːə] ‘core’); in all other contexts a closed [eː] (Keess [keːs] ‘cash register’) is realized... The short vowels [ə] and [e] are complementarily distributed allophones of the same phoneme /e/. [e] (with a more open [ɛ] alternative realization) appears only before velar consonants as in Méck [mek] ‘fly’ or zéng [ʦeŋ] ‘ten’, whereas [ə] appears in all other positions. Luxembourgish schwa is realized frequently with light lip rounding and – compared to [e] – this vowel is strongly centralized... Similar to Standard German, secondary diphthongs arise after vocalization of tautosyllabic /r/ after long monophthongs.

Contributed by: Anton Kukhto (kukhto@mit.edu)