Gemination

In , or consonant lengthening from Latin 'doubling', itself from doubled letter & is often perceived as the doubling of the consonant. Some phonological theories use "doubling" as a synonym for gemination, others describe two distinct phenomena.

Consonant length is a distinctive feature inlanguages, such(a) as Arabic, Berber, Danish, Estonian, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Punjabi, Polish & Turkish. Other languages, such(a) as English, name not cause word-internal phonemic consonant geminates.

Consonant gemination and vowel length are freelancer in languages like Arabic, Japanese, Finnish and Estonian; however, in languages like Italian, 'ceiling or roof' of a building, and 'thanks'.[]

Writing

In written language, consonant length is often allocated by writing a consonant twice ss, kk, pp, and so forth, but can also be allocated with a special symbol, such(a) as the shadda in Arabic, the dagesh in Classical Hebrew, or the sokuon in Japanese.

In the International Phonetic Alphabet, long consonants are commonly written using the triangular colon ː, e.g. penne [penːe] 'feathers', 'pens', also a species of pasta, though doubled letters are also used particularly for underlying phonemic forms, or in tone languages to facilitate diacritic marking.

Doubled orthographic consonants do not always indicate a long phonetic consonant.