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I'm a native Turkish speaker and I recently started noticing people around me pronounce "r" as "sh", sometimes [ʒ], when it's at the end of a word. So it's like,

Hayır -> Hayış

Duvar -> Duvaş

Kediler -> Kedileş

And they do the same thing when pronouncing words in other languages as well, like in English they'll pronounce "car" as /kɑʃ/, and obviously this isn't an issue among other native Turkish speakers.

Does this have some sort of name? I couldn't get anywhere by googling it.

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  • I don't have any particular knowledge of Turkish so am not sure if it is genuinely this, but it seems like a variant of final-obstruent devoicing (sometimes referred to by its German name Auslautverhärtung), which is apparently partially present in Turkish
    – Tristan
    Commented Dec 5, 2022 at 10:17
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    It's not an uncommon change cross-linguistically. Consider Czech 'ř' (/r̝/) and Polish 'rz' (/ʐ/) which correspond to Russian 'р' (/r/). Conversely, in Old Latin and Old Norse (independently) /s/ -> /z/ -> /r/ in some contexts .
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Dec 5, 2022 at 16:35

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We would just call it "final devoicing", but that could be confused with another rule that applies to obstruent stops (sap ~ sapa 'stalk' vs. kap ~ kaba 'container'). The prior question is whether /r/ at the end of a word is actually identical to /ʃ/ = ‹ş›. At least for some speakers, underlying /ʃ/ is more retracted than final /r/ when it devoices. Another difference is that r-devoicing seems to only apply prepausally but stop-devoicing applies syllable-finally. Therefore there is devoicing of the root consonant before the plural in kaplar, but not in ʃehirler. When you have two similar rules, one usually assigns different names, such as "stop devoicing" and "r-devoicing". Because the output of r-devoicing is a unique segment (but the output of stop-devoicing is an already-existing segment), there is little mention of r-devoicing in discussions of phonological processes of Turkish.

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