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.*

We measured orthographic differences between five Germanic languages. First, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages does not correlate with orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. We found this hypothesis true when considering the aggregated stem and affix distances between the languages. We also correlated the stem and affix distances within the cognate pairs in each language pair. We found low correlations, the lowest of them being not significant. Second, we tested the hypothesis that orthographic stem variation among languages is larger than orthographic variation in inflectional affixes. This hypothesis was also found to be true. Orthographic distance is likely to be a potential predictor of written intelligibility, but our results suggest that when modeling written intelligibility, a distinction needs to be made between stem and affix distances.*