Icelandic phonology
However, fricative and sonorant consonant phonemes exhibit regular contrasts in voice, including in nasals (rare in the world's languages).
Examples of alternations across different positions: Voiced consonants are devoiced word-finally before a pause, so that dag ('day (acc.)')
[ð] is used intervocalically, as in iða [ˈɪːða] ('vortex') and word-finally, as in bað [ˈpaːð] ('bath'), although it is devoiced to [θ] before pause.
Some loanwords (mostly from Classical Greek) have introduced the phone [θ] in intervocalic environments, as in Aþena [ˈaθɛna] ('Athens').
[citation needed] The phone [θ] is actually a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠].
Recently, there has been an increasing tendency, especially among children, to pronounce initial hn as voiced, e.g. hnífur [ˈniːvʏr̥] ('knife') rather than standard [ˈn̥iːvʏr̥].
The palatal nasals are clearly non-phonemic, although there is some debate about [ŋ] due to the common deletion and [k] coalescence of [kn].
Modern Icelandic is often said to have a rare kind of stops, the so-called pre-aspirated stops [ʰp ʰt ʰc ʰk] (e.g. löpp [ˈlœʰp] 'foot'), which occur only after a vowel and do not contrast with sequences [hp ht hc hk] (which do not occur in Icelandic).
A major disadvantage, however, is that it results in a large number of unexplained lexical and grammatical alternations.
Under the orthographic approach, for example (especially if a minimalist approach is also adopted), all words with the root sag-/seg- ('say') have a phonemic /ɡ/, despite the varying phones [k], [x], [ɣ], [j] occurring in different lexical and inflectional forms, and similarly all words with the root sak- ('blame') have a phonemic /k/, despite the varying phones [k], [kʰ], [hk].
Under the phonetic approach, however, the phonemes would vary depending on the context in complicated and seemingly arbitrary ways.
The maximalist approach accords with the presence of minimal pairs like gjóla [ˈcouːla] ('light wind') vs. góla [ˈkouːla] ('howl') and kjóla [ˈcʰouːla] ('dresses') vs. kóla [ˈkʰouːla] ('cola'), along with general speakers' intuitions.
A minimalist analysis, however, would note the restricted distribution of these phonemes, the lack of contrast in this position with sequences [hl hr hn hj] and the fact that similar sequences [kl kr kn] do occur, and analyze [l̥ r̥ n̥ ç] as /hl hr hn hj/, in accordance with the orthography.
Due to flámæli trends in the 20th century, vowels /ɪ, ʏ/ and /ɛ, œ/ were swapped (or even merged into the mid series).
A variety of phonotactic processes govern how Icelandic consonants and vowels assimilate with each other in speech.
[12] If any of the velar consonant sequences k g kk gg nk ng occur immediately before any of the front vowels /ɛ ei ɪ i/ or the consonant j /j/, and usually also before the diphthong æ /ai/, then the sequences' velar phones change into their corresponding palatal phones.
This process does not occur in some dialects of southern Iceland, where the vowel may remain phonetically long and not change.
Since ng and nk are consonant clusters that cannot occur at the beginning of a word or morpheme, all vowels immediately before them can only be phonetically short.
In particular, this makes the consonant pairs p/b and t/d homophones between vowels within a morpheme, though b and d tend not to occur in this position in Icelandic words inherited from Old Norse anyway.
The aspiration does not always completely disappear, though: But many of the dialects of northern Iceland, especially in the Eyjafjörður and Þingeyjarsýsla regions, may retain postaspiration of p t k as [pʰ tʰ kʰ] between vowels.
Furthermore, in Þingeyjarsýsla and northeast Iceland, the sequences mp nt nk lp lk ðk within a morpheme before a vowel may retain a voiced pronunciation of their first consonant and a postaspirated pronunciation of their second consonant, resulting in [mpʰ ntʰ ŋkʰ lpʰ lkʰ ðkʰ].
