Consonants Unvoicing of /d/ and /z/

Parry (1999: 37) records the very occasional use of [t] finally in cold, second, which he links to certain English loanwords in Welsh in which final /ld/ becomes /lt/, and final /nd/ becomes /nt/ (for example, golt “gold”, diamwnt “diamond”).

Also, in traditional Welsh-speaking regions in the north-west and west-to-south-west, there is a considerable tendency to use [s] for RP /z/ in word-medial and word-final positions, for example, in thousand, and cheese. This again can be explained by influence from the Welsh language, which has no /z/, although the phoneme can occur in loanwords from English.

Should these cases of ‘unvoicing’ in Welsh English, when compared with RP phonology, be treated as phonemic substitution (/t/ for /d/, and /s/ for /z/), or as variant realizations (of /d/, and /z/)? The decision is not altogether straightforward. Given the evident phonotactic constraints, the latter analysis is perhaps tidier. However, the apparent underlying cause (originating in the Welsh language) is phonemic.