Inphonetics,clipping is the process of shortening thearticulation of aphonetic segment, usually avowel. Aclipped vowel is pronounced more quickly than an unclipped vowel and is often alsoreduced.
Particularly in NetherlandsDutch, vowels in unstressed syllables are shortened and centralized, which is particularly noticeable with tense vowels; compare the/oː/ phoneme inkonijn[kʊˈnɛin]ⓘ 'rabbit' andkoning[ˈkounɪŋ]ⓘ 'king'.
Many dialects of English (such asAustralian English,General American English,Received Pronunciation,South African English andStandard Canadian English) have two types of non-phonemic clipping: pre-fortis clipping and rhythmic clipping.
The first type occurs in astressed syllable before afortis consonant, so that e.g.bet[ˈbɛt] has a vowel that is shorter than the one inbed[ˈbɛˑd]. Vowels preceding voiceless consonants that begin a next syllable (as inkeychain/ˈkiː.tʃeɪn/) are not affected by this rule.[1]
Rhythmic clipping occurs in polysyllabic words. The more syllables a word has, the shorter its vowels are and so the first vowel ofreadership is shorter than inreader, which, in turn, is shorter than inread.[1][2]
Clipping with vowel reduction also occurs in many unstressed syllables.
Because of the variability of vowel length, the ⟨ː⟩ diacritic is sometimes omitted in IPA transcriptions of English and so words such asdawn orlead are transcribed as/dɔn/ and/lid/, instead of the more usual/dɔːn/ and/liːd/. Neither type of transcription is more correct, as both convey exactly the same information, but transcription systems that use the length mark make it more clear whether a vowel is checked or free. Compare the length of the RP vowel/ɒ/ in the wordnot as opposed to the corresponding/ɒ/ in Canadian English, which is typically longer (like RP/ɑː/) because Canadian/ɒ/ is a free vowel (checked/ɒ/ is very rare in North America,[citation needed] as it relies on a three-way distinction betweenLOT,THOUGHT andPALM) and so can also be transcribed as/ɒː/.
TheScottish vowel length rule is used instead of those rules in Scotland and sometimes also in Northern Ireland.
Many speakers ofSerbo-Croatian from Croatia and Serbia pronounce historical unstressed long vowels as short, with some exceptions (such as genitive plural endings). Therefore, the nameJadranka is pronounced[jâdraŋka], rather than[jâdraːŋka].[3]
