Help:IPA/Icelandic
Wikipedia key to pronunciation of Icelandic
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Icelandic language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters. This key is allophonic which means that it encodes main allophones of the distinctive sounds.
 | This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Icelandic on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Icelandic in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them. Integrity must be maintained between the key and the transcriptions that link here; do not change any symbol or value without establishing consensus on the talk page first. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. |
See Icelandic phonology and Icelandic orthography § Spelling-to-sound correspondence for a more thorough look at the sounds of Icelandic.
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Notes
- Aspirated stops devoice adjacent consonants when part of the same morpheme as a form of post- or pre-aspiration but are, in standard varieties, themselves pronounced unaspirated other than word initially. However, preserving them post-aspirated intervocalically is a feature of northern dialects, compare flauta //ˈflœy.tʰa//, ⓘ/ ⓘ. Most speakers though alternate between the two favoring aspiration the more formal the context is.
In the Northeast, may additionally be kept post-aspirated mp, nt, nk, lp, lk, ðk. - Several sounds may be represented by graphical ⟨f⟩ ⟨p⟩ and ⟨g⟩, which alternate for historical reasons based on phonological environment. Paradigms and derivation may thus seem more opaque on the phonetical plan, e.g. segi [sɛijɪ], sagt [saxt], sagði [saɣðɪ], sagna [sakna] all derived from segja [sɛija].
- Utterance finally, voiced consonants loose their full voicing. After another consonant the devoicing can only be total, e.g. -son ⓘ ~ logn ⓘ, hafið ⓘ ~ -byggð ⓘ.[1] This is a prosodic process not an assimilatory one i.e it is triggered merely by the position of the word in a phrase not some following consonants. Hence the use of the voiced graphemes.
A similar process affects stops, rendering them somewhat aspirated.[2] - Nasals may assimilate their articulation point to a following obstruent (almost universal for /n/), being realised as [m, n, ɲ, ŋ] before corresponding stops. Before voiceless fricative, there is often no complete oral closure and weak nasalised fricatives [ṽ, z̃, ɣ̃] or long nasalised vowels are heard. This key doesn't transcribe frication. Stress and phrase boundaries meddle in (cf. English: assimilated CO[Ŋ]gress V.S non-assimilated co[n]GRESsional). E.g Jón fór heim ⟦ˈjouṽfouˈr̥eiːm⟧ 'JOHN went HOME (default)', [jounˈfouːr̥eim] 'John WENT home (focus on what John did)'.[4][5]
- Stressed vowels are usually long if they are followed by no more than one consonant, double consonants counting as more than one. This applies across word boundaries and length attribution may thus vary between utterances. Internal clusters of /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, s/ + /v, j, r/ and individual words ending in /pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, s/ always take a long vowel.[7] E.g. hem (á) ('ice (on)'), hesja ('hayrack'), hes til ('dewlap to'), vitgrannur pronounced [ˈvɪːtkranʏr] ('stupid') have long vowels. But the stressed one in hem til (ice to), hemja ('to manage') is short.
Vowel length is fully predicable and thus not phonemic. - Closer to fat in most British and Irish accents; closer to fart in most North American, Australian and New Zealand accents
- Closer to fad in most British and Irish accents; closer to father in most North American, Australian and New Zealand accents
- Between a u-glide (orthographic ú, ó, á) and historically back vowel (u, o, a), /ɣ/ is regularly elided; rendering kúa 'cows dat', kúga 'to suppress', and less often kúfa 'heaps' homophonous as [ˈkʰuːa].
- Icelandic has a wide array of consonnant cluster simplifications. Some of them are optional, other aren't (like above mentioned ⟨fnd, fnt⟩ [m, m̥]). A list of can be found in Rögnvaldsson (2020:22–24).