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

y a middle-aged male speaker. In both examples the stop itself is produced
as voiceless and unaspirated. However, in the latter example, the
stop is preceded by a preaspiration, which is not present before the former
stop.
Finally, we consider some stray remarks on possible preaspiration
“sightings” in the Americas. Hansson (1997:33) cites personal communication
with Michael Piper 1 , who described to him “some kind of preaspirated
stops” in one of the numerous dialects of the Oto-Manguean language
Zapotec, which in some other dialects was reflected as preglottalisation.
Lastly, Holmer (1952:19), who described preaspiration in Goajiro,
comments that many of the Iroquoian languages in southeastern
Canada had “an aspirate (h) before a stop” resulting in “such combinations
as hk and ht.” Holmer does not name specific languages or dialects
and it is difficult to know whether he interprets these aspirative sounds as
being an inherent property of the stops or /h/-phonemes. Although information
in these cases is very limited, they certainly warrant further investigation.
Within Europe, preaspiration has been reported to occur only in the
northwestern region: the Scandinavian peninsula, Iceland, the Faroes, the
Orkneys, Shetland, the Western Isles, and the northernmost parts of Scotland
and Ireland. In this area, preaspiration is found in a number of languages
and dialects from no less than three language families (Germanic,
Celtic and Lappic) of two different stocks (Indo-European and Finno-
Ugric). Thus, as Wagner (1964) observes, preaspiration in this part of the
world is clearly an areal phenomenon. Depending on the criteria used for
counting, there are 10–20 languages and dialects in this area in which
preaspiration has been reported to occur. These include Icelandic,
Faroese, several dialects of Norwegian and Swedish, Scots Gaelic, Irish
and almost all the Saami languages. The nature and geographical distribution
of preaspiration in this area, as well as the languages and dialects
involved, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.
The segment inventories of several of the languages in which preaspiration
is alleged to occur form part of the UCLA Phonological Segment
Inventory Database, or UPSID (Maddieson, 1984; Maddieson &
1 Affiliated at the time with the Summer Institute of Lingustics.
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