Most modern continental West Germanic languages developed final devoicing, the earliest evidence appearing in Old Dutch around the 9th or 10th century. However, Yiddish notably does not alter final voiced sounds; this appears to be a later reversal.
Of the North Germanic languages, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish do not have final devoicing. As in Danish, Icelandicstops are voiceless, but it has voiced fricatives which may also occur word-finally. Gothic also developed final devoicing independently.
Romanian does not have it. Other Romance languages such as French and Italian rarely have words with final voiced consonants for different reasons in their phonological histories, but borrowings from English into French or Italian that have a voiced final consonant are not devoiced.
Note: Hungarian, which lies geographically between Germanic- and Slavic- speaking areas, does not have it. Terminal devoicing is indicated in the orthography in Turkish, but it isn't in Azeri. For example, the personal name Məhməd is pronounced in Azeri, with a final, even though it is spelled with a final. Meanwhile, the Turkish version of this name is also pronounced with a final, but is spelled with a more phonetically accurate Mehmet.
Examples
Dutch and Afrikaans
In Dutch and Afrikaans, terminal devoicing results in homophones such as hard 'hard' and hart 'heart' as well as differences in consonant sounds between the singular and plural forms of nouns, for example golf–golven and golf–golwe for 'wave–waves'. The history of the devoicing phenomenon within the West Germanic languages is not entirely clear, but the discovery of a runic inscription from the early fifth century suggests that this terminal devoicing originated in Frankish. Of the old West Germanic languages, Old Dutch, a descendant of Frankish, is the earliest to show any kind of devoicing, and final devoicing also occurred in Frankish-influenced Old French.
English
does not have phonological final-obstruent devoicing of the type that neutralizes phonemic contrasts; thus pairs like bad and bat are distinct in all major accents of English. Nevertheless, voiced obstruents are devoiced to some extent in final position in English, especially when phrase-final or when followed by a voiceless consonant. Old English had final devoicing of, although the spelling did not distinguish and. It can be inferred from the modern pronunciation of half with a voiceless, from an originally voiced fricative in Proto-Germanic . There was also final devoicing of to finally, evidenced by spellings like burh alongside burg.
German
Final-obstruents devoicing occurs in the varieties from Northern Germany. The German contrast between homorganic obstruents is more properly described as a fortis and lenis opposition than an opposition of voiceless and voiced sounds. Therefore, the term devoicing may be misleading, since voice is only an optional feature of German lenis obstruents. By contrast, the German term for the phenomenon, :de:Auslautverhärtung|Auslautverhärtung, refers to fortition rather than devoicing. However, the German phenomenon is similar to the final devoicing in other languages in that the opposition between two different kinds of obstruents disappears at the ends of words, making homophones of such pairs as Rad and Rat, both pronounced. The German varieties of the north, and many pronunciations of Standard German, optionally involve voice in the distinction between fortis and lenis obstruents however. Some examples from Northern German include:
Russian
Final-obstruent devoicing can lead to the neutralization of phonemic contrasts in certain environments. For example, Russian бес and без are pronounced identically in isolation as. The presence of this process in Russian is also the source of the seemingly variant transliterations of Russian names into -off, especially by the French, as well as older English transcriptions.
Devoicing in compounds
In compounds, the behaviour varies between languages:
In some languages, devoicing is lexicalized, which means that words that are devoiced in isolation retain that final devoicing when they are part of a compound. In German, for example, the devoicing of the word Abend "evening" is preserved in the compound Abendsonne "evening sun", while the final in the plural Abende "evenings" retains the voice.
In other languages, it is purely phonological. which means that voicing depends solely on position and on assimilation with adjacent consonants. Example: Slovene.
