Glottal Stop in Võro South Estonian
Glottal Stop in Võro South Estonian

Summary/Abstract: One of the most striking characteristics of Võro South Estonian is the glottal stop that occurs as a peculiar consonant phoneme. The present article investigates the occurrence, quality, and duration of the glottal stop, and the F0 contour of the words with the glottal stop, in controlled and spontaneous speech from the East-Võro area. The acoustic analyses have been carried out with the program PRAAT. The results show that the Võro glottal stop occurs always as a word-final stop whose duration is similar to that of word-final semi-long consonants. The glottal stop is pronounced more frequently in certain word and sentence structures and often gets assimilated with the initial consonant of the following word. The Võro glottal stop has characteristics triggering both phonemic and morpho-phonological processes as well as intonational characteristics. The Võro glottal stop is a phoneme that has certain prosodic features that are above all used for highlighting grammatical and communicational meanings.

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