Consonant Length

Many languages have distinctive consonant length. This feature is also known as gemination. In English consonant length is only distinctive across morpheme boundaries but never within a word.

In Finnish the words kuka and kukka are distinguished by consonant length. The former means who and the latter means flower. In English such a distinction never occurs within a single word, but it can occur across word boundaries. An example is night train and night rain. The first compound has a long consonant and the second has a short one. With affricates, consonant length isn't distinctive. For example, orange juice is pronounced with a single affricate.

Consonant length is distinctive in many languages. They include Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese and Swedish. English has distinctive consonant length across word boundaries but not within a single word.