Areality of long vowels in unstressed syllables (and first-syllable stress)

Similar-Speech2371:

Definitely an areal (phonotactics) feature for Czech-Slovak-Hungarian-BCMS. In the past for Finnish-(Old) Estonian-Latvian as well.

Edit 1: Lithuanian has (prescriptively) also long unstressed syllables, though the stress is not fixed on any syllable.

Edit 2: The maps has an areal focus for languages with a phonemic distinction about long and short unstressed vowels (i.e. minimal pairs like Finnish kauna vs. kaunaa, Latvian Rīga vs. Rīgā, Czech potřebuji vs. potřebují, Hungarian haza vs. hazá, BCMS žène vs. žènē).

Edit 3: Apart from Lithuanian, also Modern Irish and Standard Arabic do show long unstressed vowels, the difference being with the aforementioned languages that they diachronically show the tendency to move away from a quantitative phonemic distinction towards a qualitative one, meaning the minimal pair is kept, but the long vowels get reduced and the vowels' quality becomes distinctive, cf. Lithuanian lygus [ˈlʲiːɡʊs] vs. lygūs [ˈlʲiːɡuːs] (prescriptive) > [ˈlʲiːɡus] (colloquial). For Arabic it becomes clear when comparing the vowels diachronically between MSA and i.e. Maghrebi.

Collection: linguistics - Tags: europe, linguistics - Source: reddit.com