Consonant lenition as a sociophonetic variable in Murrinh Patha (Australia) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sound change in Aboriginal Australia: Word-initial engma deletion in Kunwok
Linguistics Vanguard Special Issue: Sound change in endangered and small speech communities, 2022
Bininj Kunwok (or simply Kunwok) is a Gunwinyguan language spoken in west Arnhem Land, Australia. It is one of the larger Australian languages with 2000 speakers, and with children still acquiring it as a first language, one of Australia’s strongest. Kunwok exhibits an enormous amount of linguistic variation, some of which is described in Evans’ (2003) pan-dialectal grammar. Here, we examine one variable in particular: word-initial engma variation. Initial consonant loss (C-loss) is a well-documented historical process in Australian languages (Blevins 2001), but there has been no systematic analysis of initial C-loss as a synchronic variable (Fletcher and Butcher 2014). In the case of Kunwok, word-initial velar-nasal deletion (e.g. nganabbarru ~ anabbarru 'buffalo') has been described as having regional distribution and is a prominent feature of speakers from the western and southern peripheries of the dialect chain, but variable in speakers from the central region (Evans, 2003). This study tests the distribution of the word-initial engma for both linguistic conditioning and sociolinguistic factors, resulting in three conclusions. First, that preceding environment is a contributing factor. Second, that morphological class is a categorical conditioning factor. And third, that the variable is spreading and there is evidence of language change in progress.
Phonological voicing contrasts in Australian Aboriginal languages
La Trobe Working Papers in Linguistics 1:17–42, 1988
It is widely known that the phonological systems of Australian Aboriginal languages show many similarities right across the continent. One characteristic of these systems that has been often reported is the lack in most languages of a phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless stops. This paper is an investigation of the occurrence of such a contrast in a number of widely scattered languages. It will be shown that, in a number of instances, phonological voicing is a recent historical development in the languages which have it, and the contrast has been subject to linguistic diffusion in one of the areas where it is found. Certain generalisations about the types of phonological voicing contrasts that tend to be found in Australia are also advanced.
Sociolinguistic variation in Australian languages
Oxford Handbook of Australian Languages
Sociolinguistic variation involves socially constituted categories, and is therefore shaped by the salient categories of a particular social context (e.g. Eckert 1989; Stanford & Preston 2009). Australian Indigenous societies have undergone rapid social change in the last 200 years, and sociolinguistic patterns have changed in response to this. Traditional societies were built upon kin relations, ceremonial status, corporate groups such as clan and moiety, and relations to the land. Sociolinguistic variation reflected these categories (e.g. Sutton 1978; Nash 1990; Wilkinson 1991; Garde 2008). But since colonisation and town settlement there have been changes in social structure, and with it the types of sociolinguistic variation. In town, youth grow up among large groups of peers, and this gives rise to generational or subcultural identities, with associated linguistic variation (e.g. Amery 1985; Langlois 2006; O’Shannessy 2011; Mansfield 2014a). Meanwhile, variation associated with kinship, clans, moieties, territories and social status has been greatly attenuated. Traditional social categories (i.e. those established before colonisation) are still recognised in town life, though the reduction of associated linguistic indexation may reflect a loss of social salience.
The vowels of Australian Aboriginal English
Basilectal varieties of Australian Aboriginal English (AAE), which are heavily influenced by the indigenous substrate, may have a very restricted set of vowels compared to Standard Australian English (SAE). A comparison of the vowels of a small group of acrolectal AAE speakers with those of the standard accent suggests that even in varieties with the same set of phonemes as SAE, speakers are using a somewhat smaller phonetic vowel space. The lower boundaries of the AAE and indigenous language spaces are very similar and, whereas the SAE vowel space represents an expansion in all directions compared with the indigenous space, the AAE space represents an expansion in an 'upward' (lower F1) direction only. Within their respective spaces, the relative positions of the monophthongs are quite similar in SAE and AAE. Diphthong trajectories are also similar, except that some have shorter trajectories (more centralised second targets) in AAE. Most of the differences there are can be ...
The consonant systems of Australian Aboriginal languages, whilst not particularly large, are very 'long and thin' -i.e. they have unusually few contrasts in the traditional vertical dimension on the IPA chart (manner of articulation), an unusually large number in the horizontal dimension (place of articulation) and no voicing contrast. Whilst three or four manner features may be sufficient, some 8 or 9 place features are needed for a theoretically adequate analysis. Our articulatory and acoustic studies show that many of the prosodic contrasts (stress, focus…) are realised in the durational and spectral characteristics of the coda consonants rather than of the vowels. Furthermore there seems to be a very strong imperative to preserve place of articulation distinctions. In connected speech Australian languages are resistant to some anticipatory processes common in other languages, such as assimilation of nasality and of place of articulation, leading to the enhancement of the left edge of consonants. Our acoustic measurements confirm that, in contradistinction to English, the stability of VC combinations is on a par with that of CV combinations.The paper discusses the interplay between the unusual feature configurations of these languages, their phonotactics and the phonetic realisations of these contrasts. It would appear that natural classes can be defined more satisfactorily in terms of articulatory features rather than acoustic features.
VC vs. CV syllables: a comparison of Aboriginal languages with English
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2004
Traditionally, phonological theory has held that the CV syllable is the basic syllable type across the world's languages. Recently however, Breen & Pensalfini (1999) have challenged the primacy of the CV syllable in phonological theory with data from Arrernte, an Aboriginal language spoken in central Australia. In this study, we set out to see if there is any acoustic phonetic basis to Breen & Pensalfini's claim. We examine real-word data from one speaker of Arrernte, five speakers of English, and three speakers each of Yanyuwa and Yindjibarndi (these are two other Aboriginal languages). Using F2 and F3 measures of the consonant, and locus equation measures, we find that CV does show more stability than VC in the English speakers' data, but that for the Aboriginal language speakers' data, there is a parity between the CV and VC measures. We suggest that this greater parity may be a necessary constraint on languages which have multiple places of articulation (six in the case of the Aboriginal languages studied here). We propose an alternative view of suprasegmental organization, and we suggest that more work is needed in order to understand the phonetic bases of suprasegmental structure.
Almost universally, diachronic sound patterns of languages reveal evidence of both regular and irregular sound changes, yet an exception may be the languages of Australia. Here we discuss a long-observed and striking characteristic of diachronic sound patterns in Australian languages, namely the scarcity of evidence they present for regular sound change. Since the regularity assumption is fundamental to the comparative method, Australian languages pose an interesting challenge for linguistic theory. We examine the situation from two different angles. We identify potential explanations for the lack of evidence of regular sound change, reasoning from the nature of synchronic Australian phonologies; and we emphasise how this unusual characteristic of Australian languages may demand new methods of evaluating evidence for diachronic relatedness and new thinking about the nature of intergenerational transmission. We refer the reader also to Bowern (this volume) for additional viewpoints f...
Vowels in Wunambal, a Language of the North West Kimberley Region
Australian Journal of Linguistics, 2015
ABSTRACT This paper presents an acoustic-phonetic analysis of vowel data from recordings of Wunambal, a Worrorran language of the Kimberley region in North West Australia. Wunambal has been analysed as a six vowel system with the contrasts /i e a o u ɨ/, with /ɨ/ only found in the Northern variety. Recordings from three senior (60+) male speakers of Northern Wunambal were used for this study. These recordings were originally made for documentation of lexical items. All vowel tokens were drawn from words in short carrier phrases, or words in isolation, and we compare vowels from both accented and unaccented contexts. We demonstrate a remarkably symmetrical vowel space, highlighting where the six vowels lie acoustically in relation to each other for the three speakers overall, and for each speaker individually. While all speakers in our corpus used the /ɨ/ vowel, the allophony observed suggests that it has a somewhat different phonemic status than other vowels. Accented and unaccented vowels are not significantly different for any speaker, and are similarly distributed in acoustic space.
Sociophonetic Variation in Vowel Categorization of Australian English
Language and Speech, 2023
This study involves a perceptual categorization task for Australian English, designed to investigate regional and social variation in category boundaries between close-front vowel contrasts. Data are from four locations in southeast Australia. A total of 81 listeners from two listener groups took part: (a) so-called mainstream Australian English listeners from all four locations, and (b) L1 Aboriginal English listeners from one of the locations. Listeners heard front vowels /ɪ e ae/ arranged in 7-step continua presented at random. Varied phonetic contexts were analyzed, with a focus on coda /l/ because of a well-known prelateral merger of /e ae/ through mid-vowel lowering (e.g., celery-salary) reported to occur in some communities in this part of Australia. The results indicate that regional variation in Australian English is evident in perception. In particular, merging of /el/-/ael/ is shown to occur in the southernmost regions analyzed, but rarely in the northern regions of the geographical area under investigation. Aside from regional variation observed, age was also a factor in how participants responded to the task: older speakers had more merger than younger speakers in many locations, which is a new finding-previously, the merger was thought to be increasing in frequency over time, yet here we see this in only one location. Aboriginal English listeners also responded differently when compared with mainstream Australian English listeners. By analyzing the perception results across a variety of regional locations, with data from two different Australian social groups in the same location, this study adds a new dimension to our understanding of regional and social variations in Australian English.