Vowel Deletion in Swedish

The basic syllable type is CV. As a result, many languages delete vowels to preserve this structure. This is certainly the case in Swedish. Let us look at examples.

The plural forms of flicka (girl) and klocka (clock) are flickor (girls) and klockor (clocks). The final vowel of flicka and klocka is deleted. It is the vowel on the left.

However, with the definite article, the vowel on the right deletes. This can be exemplified with bro (bridge) and öga (eye). The definite article for singular nouns is -en or -et. The suffix -en is for common nouns, and -et is for neuter nouns. The noun bro has common gender, and öga has neuter gender.

The Swedish word bron means the bridge, and the word ögat means the eye. Vowel deletion occurs, but in this case the vowel on the right deletes. 

One explanation for the different types of vowel deletion may be connected to the variants of the definite article and the plural. The definite article of singular nouns has two forms, -en and -et. Even with vowel deletion, the two are easily distinguished.

However, the plural marker has more variants. The plural of dag (day) is dagar. One of the plural variants in Swedish is -ar. It could be that in words such as flicka, right-vowel deletion is needed to preserve the plural variant -or and thus avoid confusion with -ar.

Vowel deletion is very common, and it can be analyzed as a syllable structure process. Swedish has two types of vowel deletion, one which deletes vowels on the left and another which deletes vowels on the right. Left vowel deletion occurs with noun plurals, and right vowel deletion occurs with singular nouns and the definite article suffix.