Startseite Linguistik & Semiotik The emergence of bunched vowels from retroflex approximants in endangered Dardic languages
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The emergence of bunched vowels from retroflex approximants in endangered Dardic languages

  • Qandeel Hussain ORCID logo EMAIL logo und Jeff Mielke
Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 28. April 2022

Abstract

Kalasha, an endangered Dardic (Indo-Aryan) language, contrasts a rich set of rhotic vowels, a vowel type, which is found in less than 1% of the world’s languages. The acoustic and articulatory correlates of rhotic vowels, and their development and geographical distribution in Kalasha and other Indo-Iranian languages are still poorly understood. The current study brings together typological data on retroflex approximants and flaps in 192 Indo-Iranian language varieties, and phonetic data on rhotic vowels and retroflex approximants in endangered Dardic (Kalasha and Dameli) and Nuristani (Kamviri and Eastern Kataviri) languages. The phylogeography of retroflex approximants and flaps indicates that rhotic vowels are prevalent in those areas of South Asia where retroflex approximants are in abundance. Specifically, the development of rhotic vowels in Kalasha may have been amplified by the presence of retroflex approximants in neighboring Nuristani languages. We show that phonetically the rhotic sounds in the two Dardic languages are produced with a bunched tongue shape, whereas the retroflex approximants in Nuristani languages are produced with the raising of the tongue tip.


Corresponding author: Qandeel Hussain, Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall (4th floor), 100 St. George Street, Toronto, ON, M5S 3G3, Canada, E-mail:

Funding source: National Science FoundationNorth Carolina State University

Award Identifier / Grant number: BCS-1562134

Acknowledgments

This project was funded by a Documenting Endangered Languages grant (BCS-1562134) from the US National Science Foundation and the NCSU Department of English. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the North Carolina State University, Raleigh.

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Supplementary Material

The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0022).


Received: 2021-02-16
Accepted: 2021-03-01
Published Online: 2022-04-28

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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