Final obstruent devoicing

Final obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as German, Dutch, Polish, and Russian, among others. In these languages, voiced obstruents in the syllable coda or at the end of a word become voiceless.

In German, the contrast between homorganic obstruents is rather an opposition of fortis and lenis than an opposition of voiceless and voiced sounds. Therefore, the term devoicing may be misleading, since voice is only an optional feature of German lenis obstruents. Likewise, the German term for the phenomenon, Auslautverhärtung, does not refer to a loss of voice and is better translated as 'final hardening'. However, the German phenomenon is similar to the final devoicing in other languages in that the opposition between two different kinds of obstruents disappears at the ends of words. Some examples from German include:
 * Laub 'foliage', pronounced
 * Rad 'wheel', pronounced
 * Zug 'train', pronounced

In Dutch and Afrikaans, terminal devoicing results in homophones such as hard 'hard' and hart 'heart' as well as differences in consonant sounds between the singular and plural forms of nouns, for example golf-golven (Dutch) and golf-golwe (Afrikaans) for 'wave-waves'.

Phonological final obstruent devoicing can lead to the neutralization of phonemic contrasts in certain environments. For example, Russian нож 'a knife' (phonemically ) and нош 'of burdens' (phonemically ) are pronounced identically as.

The Russian practice of this process is also the source of the seemingly variant transliterations of Russian names into "-off", especially by the French.

English does not have phonological final obtruent devoicing of the type that neutralizes phonemic contrasts; thus pairs like bad and bat are distinct in all major accents of English. Nevertheless voiced obstruents are devoiced to some extent in final position in English, especially when phrase-final or when followed by a voiceless consonant (for example, bad cat ). The most salient distinction between bad and bat is not the voicing of the final consonant but rather the duration of the vowel and the glottalization of final : bad is pronounced while bat is.

List of languages with final obstruent devoicing

 * Afrikaans
 * Catalan
 * Dutch
 * Georgian
 * German
 * Luxembourgish
 * Polish
 * Russian
 * Turkish (for plosives)