A grammar of Pite Saami, 2014

2 Prosody
dB. The final lexical item njuovvat begins at 64 dB on the initial syllable nucleus,
and drops abruptly to 50 dB on the final syllable nucleus.
2.3.2 Utterance-final weakening
The final two or three syllables of a declarative utterance in Pite Saami can be
weakened as a way to mark the end of an utterance. 4 This weakening is typically
realized by completely devoicing the final one, two or three syllables, often to
the point that these are essentially whispered. Alternatively, this can be realized
as creaky voice instead of voicelessness. For instance, in the example utterance
depicted in the waveform in Figure 2.4 and transcribed in (21), devoicing occurs
in the final lexical word giesev ‘summer’, which contains the last two syllables
of the utterance.
da’l adnam buorak buorak giesev
Figure 2.4: Waveform illustrating utterance-final weakening
(21) da’l
t-a=l
adnam
at̚na-m
dem-3pl.nom=be\3pl.prs have-prf
‘They have had a good summer.’
buorak,
pʊ͡ɔrakʰ
good
buorak
pʊ͡ɔrak
good
giesev
kɪ̥ ͡e̥se̥-v̥
summer-acc.sg
[pit090826.012]
The lack of energy in the waveform corresponding to giesev shows clearly that
the word is weakened significantly compared to the rest of the utterance. Note
that even the vowels are completely devoiced.
It is not clear what triggers this devoicing, and future study, particularly looking
at the possibility of it being a turn marker in discourse, is needed.
4 Arjeplogsmål, the local Swedish dialect, features a similar phenomenon.
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