zërimi

Zërimi is a term used in Albanian linguistics to denote the property of sound production that involves the vibration of the vocal cords. In phonetics, a sound is described as voiced if the vocal folds vibrate during its articulation and as voiceless if they do not. Zërimi is a contrastive feature for many languages, including Albanian, where voiced and voiceless consonants form distinct phonemes. The distinction is important for correct pronunciation and for understanding how sounds relate to each other within words.

In phonological analysis, zërimi can be influenced by context. Voicing can spread between adjacent sounds in some environments, a process known as voicing assimilation, or it can be blocked, resulting in devoicing of certain consonants at word boundaries. Albanian, like many languages, exhibits a range of contexts in which the perception and production of voicing may vary slightly due to speaker, dialect, or speech rate. Orthography in Albanian typically mirrors the underlying phonemic voicing distinctions for consonants.

Vowels are generally voiced, and voicing is especially salient for consonants. The International Phonetic Alphabet marks voicing with the feature [+voice] or [-voice], and for stops, voice onset time helps describe the temporal aspect of voicing relative to release. Beyond its linguistic meaning, zërimi can also refer in media contexts to voice production, such as voiceover or dubbing, though in scholarly use the term most often describes phonetic voicing.