Is /kləʊðz/ really the correct phonetic transcription of the word "clothes"?

I hope this question fits the group.

As a teacher of EFL I have come across this question several times:

Question: Does "/kləʊðz/" provide the right phonemic representation of the final sound in the word "clothes"?

"Oxford Learner's Dictionaries" gives four variants. In both BrE variant recordings, what I hear is a final unvoiced /s/ sound, and this is also the way I pronounce it. The dictionary seems to transcribe the final sound in both cases of BrE as voiced /z/-sound. (see Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, "Clothes")

Collins Dictionary, explicitly states that their phonemic representions follow Received Pronunciation:

The accent represented by the pronunciations in this dictionary is Received Pronunciation.

gives the same transcription of "clothes".

It seems practically impossible to me (let alone to my students) to actually realise the pronunciation suggested by the phonemic representation provided.

You need to keep a couple of things in mind:

• The glyphs employed in the pronunciations you find in dictionaries are not "phonetic transcriptions" but phonemic representations (note that they are enclosed in //, not []). That is, they do not represent actual, infinitely variable acoustic phenomena but elements in the finite set of structurally categorized entities onto which hearers map what they hear. /z/ is the 'meaning' of the phone uttered, not its physical realization.

• Pronunciation—physical realization—is environmentally conditioned: actual acoustic output of any phoneme is determined by the context in which it appears. With clothes, for instance, the voicing of the terminal /z/ will be sustained if the /z/ liaises with a following voiced phoneme but will slide off into /s/ if it liaises with a following unvoiced phoneme:

  I have clothes in my closet → /kləʊð zɪn/
  I took clothes from my closet → /kləʊð sfrɒm/ (sorta—it's actually more like .../zsf/...

  But what is heard in both cases, by a Real Hearer attending to the discursive meaning rather than the acoustic actuality, is the phoneme /z/.

The recorded pronunciations you find in dictionaries are artificially abstracted from context, like the wretched example sentences in grammarbooks and exams. But in practical terms there is no such thing as a 'null context' in Real Speech; the actual context of these pronunciations is a by-definition-voiceless silence following the phoneme /z/. So the Real Speaker slides off into the patent voicelessness which concludes these utterances.

In words like grieves, clothes, many speakers stop the voicing of the final /z/ earlier than you might expect from the phonemic transcription. Most English speakers still hear the phonemes /vz/ anyway, because at the end of a word, /vs/ is a combination of phonemes that does not appear in English. We only need to distinguish between griefs and grieves: /griːfs/ versus /griːvz/. We do this on the basis of whether the penultimate consonant is voiced.

Thus, the two pronunciations [griːvz] and [griːvs] represent the same underlying phonemes, which dictionaries represent as /griːvz/.

I'm not a trained phoneticist, so I don't entirely trust my ears. But I think you're right in that the Oxford dictionary's British speaker for the pronunciation /kləʊðz/ is actually saying [kləʊðs]. In the Collins dictionary, for this pronunciation, I think the voicing stops part way through the final /z/.

I can't say whether the "correct" pronunciation for RP is [griːvz] or [griːvs] or somewhere halfway in between, or all three possibilities. To decide that, you would have to collect recordings from a lot of RP speakers and examine the statistics for when they stop voicing the final consonant. Quite possibly, somebody has already done this.

The dictionaries give the phonemic transcription, which is /kləʊðz/ (and which is consistent with both phonetic transcriptions [kləʊðz] and [kləʊðs]).