Provisionaläänet

Provisionaläänet is a term used in phonology to describe transient phonetic realizations that appear during early or ongoing stages of a sound change, or in situations involving language contact. They are not yet established as stable phonemes or regular allophones, but rather hypothesized intermediate sounds that may help explain observed variation across dialects or speaker groups. The concept functions as a methodological tool for modeling how a phonological system could evolve from one state to another.

In practice, provisionaläänet are marked in field notes and analyses as temporary or transitional variants. They may be represented with provisional or environment-specific IPA realizations, and their status is explicitly described as tentative until more data clarify their role. Researchers use provisionaläänet to account for irregular pronunciations, sporadic alternations, or regionally restricted patterns that do not fit a single, steady phonemic inventory.

Examples are typically hypothetical or based on limited data, illustrating how a single phoneme might split, merge, or shift in response to adjacent sounds or borrowing. For instance, a presumed transitional stop that neighbors a high front vowel could surface as a brief palatalized variant in some contexts before stabilizing as either one of the surrounding phonemes or as a new phoneme entirely. Provisionaläänet thus help bridge observational evidence with theoretical accounts of change, without committing prematurely to a fixed outcome.

See also: phoneme, allophone, sound change, historical linguistics, transitional variants.