geminadas

Geminadas is a term used in linguistics to refer to geminated consonants, that is, consonants produced with a longer duration than their singleton counterparts. In languages with a phonemic contrast, lengthened consonants can distinguish meaning, so a word with a geminate consonant may differ in lexical identity from a word with a single consonant. In other languages, consonant length is allophonic or predictable rather than contrastive.

Phonetic realization of geminadas typically involves a longer articulatory closure or contact for the affected consonant. Stop consonants may show an extended closure and a longer release, while fricatives and sonorants simply retain lengthened timing. In many languages, gemination interacts with other phonological features such as vowel length, syllable structure, and stress patterns. The perceptual cue is mainly duration, though some languages also display subtle changes in aspiration or voicing.

Cross-linguistic distribution is broad. Italian uses consonant length contrastively, as in fatto [ˈfatːo] versus fato [ˈfato]. Japanese indicates gemination orthographically with a small kana character indicating a doubled consonant, as in がっこう gakkou. Other languages with phonemic gemination include Arabic, Turkish, Finnish, and some Bantu languages. In languages without phonemic gemination, length is typically not used to distinguish words, though listeners may still perceive occasional length differences due to speech rate or phonetic context.

Orthography often marks geminadas with doubled letters in writing systems (for example, Italian "ss", "tt"), while other languages use explicit symbols or diacritics, or rely on the recognition of morpheme boundaries that trigger doubling. Gemination remains a central topic in studies of phonology, phonetics, and language acquisition.