Unlike many languages, Icelandic has only very minor dialectal differences in sounds. The language has both monophthongs and diphthongs, and many consonants can be voiced or unvoiced.
Icelandic has an aspiration contrast between plosives, rather than a voicing contrast, similar to Faroese, Danish and Standard Mandarin. Preaspirated voiceless stops are also common. However, fricative and sonorant consonant phonemes exhibit regular contrasts in voice, including in nasals (rare in the world's languages). Additionally, length is contrastive for consonants, but not vowels. In Icelandic, the main stress is always on the first syllable.
Consonants
The number and nature of the consonant phonemes in modern Icelandic is subject to broad disagreement, due to a complex relationship among consonant allophones.
Major allophones
Even the number of major allophones is subject to some dispute, although less than for phonemes. The following is a chart of potentially contrastive phones (important phonetic distinctions which minimally contrast in some positions with known phonemes; not a chart of actual phonemes), according to one analysis :
{| class="wikitable" style="margin: 1em auto 1em auto; text-align: center;" |+Consonant phones ! colspan="2" | ! colspan="2" | Labial ! colspan="2" | Coronal ! colspan="2" | Palatal ! colspan="2" | Velar ! Glottal |- ! colspan="2" | Nasal | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" |
! colspan="2" | Stop | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" |
! rowspan="2" | Continuant ! Non-Sibilant | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" |
! Sibilant | colspan="2" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | colspan="4" |
! colspan="2" | Trill | rowspan="2" colspan="2" | | style="border-right: 0;" | || style="border-left: 0;" | | rowspan="2" colspan="5" | |- ! colspan="2" | Lateral | style="border-right: 0;"| || style="border-left: 0;" |
are dental , whereas are alveolar, . is an apical alveolar sibilant fricative, "It is never voiced, as s in sausen, and it is pronounced by pressing the tip of the tongue against the alveolar ridge, close to the upper teeth – somewhat below the place of articulation of the German sch. The difference is that German sch is labialized, while Icelandic s is not. It is a pre-alveolar, coronal, voiceless spirant.", cited in . whereas are alveolar non-sibilant fricatives . The former is laminal, while the latter is usually apical.: "In this investigation we used X-ray cinematography and direct palatography to reveal the alveolar nature of þ, ð, and s. [...] [þ] being articulated dorsally, [ð] apically or dorsally".: "In Icelandic, these sounds are alveolar, and laminal when unvoiced" (translated quote). They are broadly transcribed with , which nominally denote dental fricatives. Voiceless continuants are always constrictive , while the voiced continuants are not very constrictive and can approach approximant realizations , and may even be deleted altogether (similar to what happened in Faroese). The rhotic consonants may either be trills or taps , depending on the speaker. Acoustic analysis reveals that the voiceless lateral approximant is realized with considerable frication, i. e. essentially as a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative . is pronounced as before a pause. Word final consonants are sometimes devoiced. is sometimes realized as . includes three extra phones, namely the glottal stop , voiceless velarized alveolar lateral approximant and its voiced counterpart . appears when an underlying is elided, e.g. . occurs as a demarcator before stressed vowels in "empty" onsets and more rarely before utterance initial consonant in formal context where it has been qualified as "functioning as a sort of upbeat". Another source of glottal stop for some speaker is the Icelandic phonology#Debbucalisation of stops before (or höggmæli).
A large number of competing analyses have been proposed for Icelandic phonemes. The problems stem from complex but regular alternations and neutralisations among the above phones in various positions.
Alternations Examples of alternations across different positions:
: tæp , tæpt : grafa ; grafta ; grafna : segi , sagt , sagði , sagna
Voiced consonants are devoiced word-finally before a pause, so that dag is pronounced , baðið is pronounced , and gaf is pronounced . Even sonorants can be affected: dagur , ketil .
Restrictions
Dorsal consonants (velar, palatal, glottal)
The glottal fricative only occurs initially before a vowel, and following a vowel in the sequences . These latter sequences are sometimes said to be unitary "pre-aspirated" stops; see below.
The voiceless velar fricative occurs only between a vowel and or , and initially as a variant of before . Because it does not contrast with in either position, it can be seen as an allophone of . However, it also alternates with , occurring before a pause where would be pronounced otherwise.
There are two sets of palatal sounds. "Alternating palatals" alternate with the velars , while "non-alternating palatals" do not. Note that appears twice here; these two 's behave differently, occur in different distributions, and are denoted by different letters (g and j). This suggests that they may belong to different phonemes, and that is indeed a common analysis.
In general, the alternating palatals are restricted to appearing before vowels. Velars are restricted to appearing everywhere except before front vowels. In other words: Before back vowels and front rounded vowels, both palatals and velars can appear; before front unrounded vowels only palatals can appear; before consonants only velars can appear.
For the non-alternating palatals : Both can appear at the beginning of a word, followed by a vowel. Elsewhere, only one can occur, which must occur after a non-velar, non-palatal consonant. occurs before a vowel, and occurs in a few words at the end of a word following .
The velars and alternating palatals are distributed as follows: Initially or at beginning of syllable: Only the four stops can appear. After that begins a syllable: only . Between vowels: only . After a vowel, finally or before or : only . After a vowel, before : only . After a vowel, before : only . After a vowel, before nasals: only . After a vowel, before : only .
Although the facts are complex, it can be noticed that only ever contrasts with one of the two velar stops, never with both, and hence can be taken as an allophone of whichever one doesn't appear in a given context. Alternatively, following the orthography, can be taken as an allophone of , where is taken as an allophone of either or depending on context, following the orthography.
Alveolar non-sibilant fricatives In native vocabulary, the fricatives and are allophones of a single phoneme . is used morpheme-initially, as in þak , and when devoiced, such as neaby an aspirated plosive (in Southern accents), e.g. in maðkur . is used elsewhere: intervocalically as in iða or word-finally, as in bað , although it is devoiced before a pause. Some loanwords (mostly from Classical Greek) have introduced the phone in intervocalic environments, as in Aþena .
The phone is a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative . The corresponding voiced phone is similar, but is apical rather than laminal .
Voiceless sonorants Of the voiceless sonorants , only the coronal occur in word-initial position, for example in hné ('knee'). Between a consonant and a pause, adjacent to fortis obstruents, only the voiceless sonorants appear; elsewhere, only the voiced sonorants appear (exepted in the ambivalent sequence ). This makes it clear that are non-phonemic.
Initial voiceless sonorants are often pronounced with a fully voiced offset, with the onset closer to being whispery voiced. are also often fricated (almost systematically for non initial ). Recently, there has been an increasing tendency, especially among children, to pronounce initial hn as voiced, e.g. hnífur ('knife') rather than standard as unmerged has the longest period of voicedness and not access to frication to enhance contrast.
Palatal and velar nasals The palatal nasals appear before palatal stops and the velar nasals before velar stops; in these positions, the alveolar nasals do not occur. appears also before , and through the deletion of in the consonant clusters , and through the coalescence of the consonants and in the consonant clusters . The palatal nasals are clearly non-phonemic, although there is some debate about due to the common deletion and coalescence of .
Aspiration and length contrasts (medial and final)
Modern Icelandic is often said to have a rare kind of stops, the so-called pre-aspirated stops (e.g. löpp 'foot'), which occur only after a vowel and do not contrast with sequences (which do not occur in Icelandic). note that phonetically, in Icelandic pre-aspirated stops the aspiration is longer than in normal post-aspirated stops, and is indistinguishable from sequences (or with replacing ) occurring in other languages; hence, they prefer to analyze the pre-aspirated stops as sequences. This makes for an amusing coincidence as Icelandic cognates with German (although this easily breaks: -, -, -, -). This is because in old Norse, inherited sequences of *h + *p, t, k merged with geminates (and lengthened the preceding vowel).
Following vowels there is a complex alternation among consonant length, vowel length and aspiration. The following table shows the alternations in medial and final position :
{| class="wikitable" |+ Aspiration and length contrasts (medial and final) ! Bilabial !! Dental !! Velar |- | koppar 'small pot' ( ) | gættir 'doorway' ( ) | sakka 'sinkstone' |- | kobbar 'young seal' ( ) | gæddir 'endow' ( past) | sagga 'dampness' ( ) |- | kopar 'copper' | gætir 'can' ( past ) | saka 'to blame' |- | opna 'open' (vb) | gætnir 'careful' ( ) | sakna 'to miss' |- | kapp 'zeal' | vítt 'wide' ( ) | dökk 'dark' ( ) |- | gabb 'hoax' | vídd 'breadth' | dögg 'dew' ( ) |- | gap 'opening' | bít 'bite' ( ) | tök 'grasps' ( )
In most analyses, consonant length is seen as phonemic while vowel length is seen as determined entirely by environment, with long vowels occurring in stressed syllables before single consonants and before certain sequences formed of a consonant plus , and short vowels occurring elsewhere. Note that diphthongs also occur long and short.
Phonemes
As discussed above, the phones , probably , and debatably are non-phonemic. Beyond this, there is a great deal of debate both about the number and identity of the phonemes in Icelandic and the mapping between phonemes and allophones.
There are a number of different approaches:
Phonetic vs. orthographic:
The "phonetic" approach. This approach tries to stay as close as possible to the phonetics. This would assume, for example, that and should be consistently analyzed in all contexts as phonemic and , respectively (or perhaps as an archiphoneme in positions where the two do not contrast), and that is a phonemic sequence (or possibly a unitary pre-aspirated ).