Germanic languages like German show two steps of vowel length as in German bitten “to beg” vs. bieten “to bid”. For Low German (LG), however, it has been argued that the language has three length steps instead. We find short LG ik sit “I sit” vs. long de Siet “the side” vs. overlong de Sied “the silk”.
The goal of this phonological investigation is to establish whether the primary prosodic feature in LG dialects is tone, vowel length, or something else entirely. We find that LG employs a combination of vowel quality and vowel quantity, which carries functional load. LG has a binary phonological system accounting for the ternary vowel duration. I point out a crucial distinction between fortis (voiceless) vs. lenis (“voiced”) consonants by means of the structural complexity of the respective segments. It is this complexity opposition in the coda consonants, which has a profound impact on the vowel duration of a preceding nucleus. With the data and analyses presented in this thesis, LG falls in the category of languages featuring three phonetic degrees of vowel length that can be traced back to a binary contrast at the phonological surface level. No ternary quantity system is required.