On Voiced Stops in Finnish
On Voiced Stops in Finnish

Summary/Abstract: There is a common crosslinguistic claim about stop inventories, that if a language has a velar voiced stop, it also has coronal and a labial; that if a language has a voiced coronal stop, it also has a labial, etc. Thus, an unexpected inventory would contain only a voiced coronal and/or dorsal stop. We present data from Finnish which stands as a counterexample to this universal, where a voiced coronal stop, but no other, exists in the inventory. We attribute the existence of this exceptional stop to historical and sociolinguistic factors.

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