Length and tenseness across Welsh dialects

This talk was presented at the First Conference on Linguistic Diversity in Wales at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth.

This talk is about the interaction of vowel quantity and quality in different dialects of Welsh. According to existing descriptions, Welsh is a bit like English in that its short vowels are consistently ‘lax’ in quality ([ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ ə]) and its long vowels are consistently ‘tense’ ([iː uː eː oː]). Here, i discuss the difficulties this raises for phonological analysis and briefly discuss two types of dialects where vowel quantity and quality are less tightly coupled. This provides evidence for the phonologization of quality. There is also a handout.

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