Cut off and drown the last syllables: Utterance-final weakening in Pite Saami

Abstract Utterance-final weakening refers to a prosodic feature found at the right periphery of some clauses in Pite Saami. This paper provides the most thorough general description of this prosodic phenomenon to date. The dataset used comes from an annotated corpus of spontaneous speech collected during the last 60 years. The phonetic-acoustic correlates are a complete devoicing of all segments in the final syllables of the affected clause, although creaky or breathy voice may also be present. Typically only one syllable is affected, but sometimes multiple syllables are affected. No syntactic units appear to correlate with this, and the weakening phase can even cross word boundaries. The phenomenon marginally correlates with gender, dialect, and age, with the speech of older speakers tending to feature it more frequently and with a longer prosodic scope. Similar utterance-final weakening phenomena are likely found in other languages, especially those in surrounding areas.