Sabrina Bendjaballah and David Le Gac: On Somali Geminates

There is a consensus on the fact that Standard Somali voiceless stops [t, k] are “never doubled to form a geminate”: they always surface as short stops (Saeed 1999:9). By contrast, Standard Somali voiced stops [b, d, g] are reputed to have geminate counterparts: [bb, dd, gg] (Saeed 1999:16). This results in an asymmetry in the way phonological length is taken to be realized in phonetics: with a length contrast for voiced stops, and with no length contrast for voiceless stops. Our aim is to provide an analysis of Standard Somali geminate voiced stops in order to decide whether such an asymmetry obtains. In addition, we extend our analysis to Djibouti Somali, with a view of providing first insights into Somali diatopic variation, which is still understudied at the present stage. Our results are thus expected to provide new information on the typology of geminates across Somali varieties.