Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 December 2014
The present article investigates the patterning of glides in Westphalian German. One question to be addressed is the structure of onglides, for example, the in Nase ‘nose’ and the in ‘village’. I argue that surface onglides are in the nucleus and not in the onset. The proposed representation contrasts with the ones for onglides in related languages, that is, English and Frisian. I show that Westphalian German also possesses a labial approximant [υ]—also known as a consonantal glide—which is distinct from both the onglide and the fricative [v]. I argue that onglides are underlying short vowels, which are parsed as glides by syllabification. The approximant [υ] is argued to be derived from /v/. The proposed analysis is shown to be superior to one in which [υ] derives from /u/, as proposed by Wiese (1996) for New High German.*