While sonority has been studied by linguists for over a century, Parker (2008, 2011) has recently argued that the sonority hierarchy can be quantified specifically by intensity, concluding that laterals are less sonorous than flaps. In this article, we test Parker’s (2008, 2011) claim that [l] is less sonorous than [ɾ]. We find that for Bavarian German, [l] is better analyzed as more sonorous than [ɾ] since [l] is both more intense and longer in duration than [ɾ]. The aforementioned phonetic properties, as well as the phonological patterning arguments provided by Noelliste (2019), confirm that [ɾ] is less sonorous than [l] in Bavarian German dialects found in Austria. We conclude by offering our thoughts on whether the sonority hierarchy can be reduced to one specific phonetic property. We argue that, in the spirit of studies such as Price (1980), Miller (2012), phonological sonority can be deduced from a series of properties, including at least the following: intensity, duration, periodicity, presence/absence of noise, and distribution in the phonological syllable. For a great number of speech sounds, these properties will point in the same direction; the challenging cases arise when one or more of these properties contradict each other.

This study examines the phenomenon of word-final /n/ deletion (WFnD) in Central Franconian dialects spoken across parts of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and France. The deletion process occurs after schwa and full vowels and manifests itself in different phonological patterns across dialects. The paper presents a comparative analysis based on a selection of local varieties, investigating the effects of the left-hand and right-hand phonological context on WFnD. The theoretical framework of the ‘Life Cycle of Phonological Processes’ serves to reconstruct the diachronic development of WFnD, allowing to trace its progression from systematic phonetic variation to a categorical phonological phenomenon and lexicalized forms. By applying this framework, the study demonstrates how different dialects exhibit WFnD at distinct stages of the life cycle, revealing the systematic nature of its historical unfolding. The findings highlight the role and interplay of prosodic, phonological, morphological and lexical factors conditioning WFnD.