Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

than in men’s. 1 My own impressionistic observations of Swedish speakers
suggest that a tendency to preaspirate is quite common in Swedish,
and I would agree with Fant et al. that women tend to preaspirate more
than do men. In fact, this applies not only to speakers of CSw, but also to
speakers of most of the main varieties of Swedish, such as Skånska,
Dalmål, and Jämtska. It should be stressed, however, that even if one can
find evidence of consistent early glottal abduction in some speakers, this
does not mean that preaspiration is a particularly noticeable feature of
their speech.
The findings for the four CSw speakers investigated here (cf. Ch.
4.2) suggest that in CSw it is not only the stops /p t k/ that tend to be
preceded by preaspiration, but also the fricatives /f/, // 2 and /s/. This
means that preaspiration is not a particular feature of stops, but a general
characteristic in production of voiceless consonants.
The word-medial intervocalic lenis stops in Swedish are generally
produced as fully voiced stops, although they are quite often voiced
fricatives or approximants. Word-initial stops are generally voiced as
well, even when they occur utterance-initially.
The contrast between /l m n/ + /b d g/ and /l m n/ + /p t k/ clusters
lies mainly in the voicing of the stops. Sonorants before stops are usually
fully voiced, and do not appear to have any significant tendency to become
voiceless before the voiceless fortis stops. In other words, the preaspiration
tendency in CSw does not extend to the sonorants in any significant
degree. Also, fortis stops that follow sonorants are not more
prone to be produced with postaspiration than are intervocalic stops.
3.6 Non-normative preaspiration in Scandinavia
As indicated in section 3.5.5, my impression is that non-normative preaspiration
occurs commonly in stop production in all of Sweden, and in
fact across the whole of the Scandinavian peninsula (see also Helgason
1999). Apart from the data on CSw provided in Chapter 4, there are three
1 This may be viewed in light of Stölten’s (2002) findings that Arjeplog females have
longer preaspiration than the males, as well as the findings of Foulkes et al. (1999) that
female and child speakers of Tyneside English tend to preaspirate, but not males.
2 Traditionally transcribed as //.
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