Final-obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as Catalan, German, Dutch, Breton, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Turkish, and Wolof. In such languages, voiced obstruents in final position (at the end of a word) become voiceless before voiceless consonants and in pausa. The process can be written as *C[+voice] → C[-voice]/__#. Languages with final-obstruent devoicing Germanic languages Most modern continental West Germanic languages developed final devoicing, the earliest evidence appearing in Old Dutch around the 9th or 10th century. Afrikaans Dutch, also Old and Middle Dutch (High) German, also Middle High German Gothic (for fricatives) Limburgish Low German, also Middle Low German Luxembourgish (only when not resyllabified) Old English (for fricatives, inconsistently for ) West Frisian. In contrast, North Frisian (and some Low German dialects in North Frisia that have a Frisian substratum) does not have final devoicing. In contrast to other continental West Germanic languages, (Eastern)-Yiddish notably does not alter final voiced sounds; this appears to be a later reversal, most probably under Slavic influence. In its earliest recorded example (Yiddish, written evidence), it has final-obstruent devoicing (טַק "tak" instead of "tag" for day.) Of the North Germanic languages, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish (the last of which has no voiced obstruents) do not have final devoicing. As in Danish, Icelandic stops are voiceless, but it has voiced fricatives which may also occur word-finally. Gothic (an East Germanic language) also developed final devoicing independently. Romance languages Among the Romance languages, word-final devoicing is common in the Gallo-Romance languages, some of which tend to exhibit strong Frankish influence (itself the ancestor of Old Dutch, above). Catalan Old French and Middle French (preserved in certain Modern French inflections such as vs. , when applying liaison vs. , but now often grammaticalized) Meridional French Friulian Lombard Occitan Romansh Notes: Standard French (by final schwa losses, see above for notes) and Romanian do not have final devoicing, however, varieties of French with substrates of Occitan and Catalan (and other final devoicing languages) do have it. Other Romance languages such as Italian rarely have words with final voiced consonants for different reasons in their phonological histories, but borrowings from English into Italian that have a voiced final consonant (such as weekend) are not devoiced. Portuguese merges and in word-final position ( and are homophones) but has a few words ending with voiced stops like (although some dialects feature an epenthetic