In
phonologyPhonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
,
hiatus (haɪˈeɪtəs; hɪˈaːtʊs "gaping") or
diaeresis (daɪˈɛrɨsɨs or daɪˈɪərɨsɨs, from
Ancient GreekAncient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
diaíresis "division") refers to two
vowelIn phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! or oh! , pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! , where there is a constriction or closure at some...
sounds occurring in adjacent
syllableA syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
s, with no intervening
consonantIn articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
. When two adjacent vowel sounds occur in the
same syllable, the result is instead described as a
diphthongA diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
.
The English words
hiatus and
diaeresis themselves contain a hiatus between the first and second syllables.
Preference
Some languages do not have diphthongs, except optionally in rapid speech, or have a limited number of diphthongs but also numerous vowel sequences which cannot form diphthongs and thus appear in hiatus. This is the case of
Japaneseis a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
,
Bantu languagesThe Bantu languages constitute a traditional sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages. There are about 250 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages...
such as
SwahiliSwahili or Kiswahili is a Bantu language spoken by various ethnic groups that inhabit several large stretches of the Mozambique Channel coastline from northern Kenya to northern Mozambique, including the Comoro Islands. It is also spoken by ethnic minority groups in Somalia...
and
ZuluZulu is the language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers, the vast majority of whom live in South Africa. Zulu is the most widely spoken home language in South Africa as well as being understood by over 50% of the population...
, and
Polynesian languagesThe Polynesian languages are a language family spoken in the region known as Polynesia. They are classified as part of the Austronesian family, belonging to the Oceanic branch of that family. They fall into two branches: Tongic and Nuclear Polynesian. Polynesians share many cultural traits...
such as
HawaiianThe Hawaiian language is a Polynesian language that takes its name from Hawaii, the largest island in the tropical North Pacific archipelago where it developed. Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the state of Hawaii...
and
MaoriMāori or te reo Māori , commonly te reo , is the language of the indigenous population of New Zealand, the Māori. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand...
. Extreme examples are Japanese
aoi 'blue/green', Swahili
eua 'to purify', and Hawaiian
aea 'to rise up', all of which are three syllables.
Avoidance
Many languages disallow or restrict hiatus, avoiding it either by deleting or assimilating the vowel, or by adding an extra consonant.
Epenthesis
A
glottal stopThe glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
or a
glideIn phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...
may be added (
epenthesisIn phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....
) between vowels to prevent hiatus.
Intrusive R
Some
non-rhoticEnglish pronunciation can be divided into two main accent groups: a rhotic speaker pronounces a rhotic consonant in words like hard; a non-rhotic speaker does not...
dialects of English insert an /r/ to avoid hiatus after non-high word-final (or occasionally morpheme-final) vowels, although prescriptive guides for
Received PronunciationReceived Pronunciation , also called the Queen's English, Oxford English or BBC English, is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional accents similar to the relationship in other European languages between their standard varieties and their regional forms...
discourage this.
Contraction
In Greek and Latin poetry, hiatus is generally avoided, though it does occur in many authors under certain rules with varying degrees of poetic licence. Hiatus may be avoided by
elisionElision is the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase, producing a result that is easier for the speaker to pronounce...
of a final vowel, occasionally
prodelision (elision of initial vowel) and
synizesisSynizesis is a sound change in which two originally syllabic vowels are pronounced as a single syllable without change in writing. In Latin and Greek, this was often to preserve meter, but similar changes occur naturally in languages....
(pronunciation of two vowels as one without change in writing).
Sandhi
In
SanskritSanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
, most instances of hiatus are avoided through the process of
sandhiSandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries . Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words...
.
Diaeresis
In
DutchDutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
,
FrenchFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, and English the second of two vowels in hiatus is marked with a diaeresis (or "tréma"). Examples in English include
coöperate,
daïs and
reëlect but over the last century its use in such words has been dropped or replaced by the use of a hyphen except in a very few publications, notably
The New YorkerThe New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. It is, however, still common in loanwords such as
naïve and
Noël.
Other ways
In Scottish Gaelic, hiatus is written using a number of digraphs:
bh, dh, gh, mh, th. Some examples include:
- abhainn "river" a.ɪɲ
- adha "liver" ɤ.ə
- ogha "nephew" o.ə
- cumha "condition" kʰũ.ə
- latha "day" lˠ̪a.ə
This convention goes back to the Old Irish scribal tradition (though it is more consistently applied in Scottish Gaelic), e.g.
lathe (>
latha). However, hiatus in Old Irish was usually simply implied in certain vowel digraphs, e.g.
óe (>
adha),
ua (>
ogha).
See also
- Diphthong
A diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
- Linking and intrusive R
- Vowel cluster
- Words without consonants
Most languages of the world allow syllables without consonants, and monosyllabic words may therefore consist of a single vowel. Examples in English are a, O, I, eye . A smaller number of languages allow sequences of such syllables, and thus may have polysyllabic words without consonants...
– extreme examples of hiatus
- Movable nu