Vowel harmony in Laz Turkish: a case study in language contact and language change
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Neşe Demir
Abstract
Laz Turkish (LT) is a nonstandard variety of Turkish mainly spoken in the North East of Turkey. LT emerged due to language contact between Turkish (Turkic) and Laz (Kartvelian). Laz has a smaller vowel system compared to Turkish and this has impacted the vowel harmony (VH) system in LT. In contrast to ST, which has a productive VH system, LT has only partially productive VH. Based on a corpus of fieldwork data collected in Rize, Turkey, this study investigates how LT displays partial harmony. The results show that (i) /ɯ, y, œ/ are rare in LT, and ST /ɯ, y, œ/ correspond to /i, u, o/ in LT respectively, (ii) open syllables in LT tend to have /i/ compared to closed syllables which tend to occur with /u/, and (iii) the smaller vowel system has led to disharmony with respect to preceding vowels, but /i u o/ still trigger harmony on following vowels, so VH does not peter out across the word.
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Sharon Rose, Farrell Ackerman, Eric Baković, Marc Garellek, John Haviland, Öner Özçelik, and two anonymous reviewers.
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Research funding: This study was funded by the University of California San Diego Friends of the International Center Fellowship. The study was approved by the Social and Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review Board at the University of California San Diego and informed consent was obtained from all participants.
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Introduction to sound change in endangered or small speech communities
- Where have all the sound changes gone? Phonological stability and mechanisms of sound change
- Where have all the sound changes gone? Examining the scarcity of evidence for regular sound change in Australian languages
- Cross-dialectal synchronic variation of a diachronic conditioned merger in Tlingit
- Vowel harmony in Laz Turkish: a case study in language contact and language change
- The evolution of tonally conditioned allomorphy in Triqui: evidence from spontaneous speech corpora
- Sound change and gender-based differences in isolated regions: acoustic analysis of intervocalic phonemic stops by Bora-Spanish bilinguals
- Place uniformity and drift in the Suzhounese fricative and apical vowels
- Flexibility and evolution of cue weighting after a tonal split: an experimental field study on Tamang
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- The expanding influence of Thai and its effects on cue redistribution in Kuy
- Speech style variation in an endangered language
- Sound change in Aboriginal Australia: word-initial engma deletion in Kunwok
- The dental-alveolar contrast in Mapudungun: loss, preservation, and extension
- Sound change or community change? The speech community in sound change studies: a case study of Scottish Gaelic
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Introduction to sound change in endangered or small speech communities
- Where have all the sound changes gone? Phonological stability and mechanisms of sound change
- Where have all the sound changes gone? Examining the scarcity of evidence for regular sound change in Australian languages
- Cross-dialectal synchronic variation of a diachronic conditioned merger in Tlingit
- Vowel harmony in Laz Turkish: a case study in language contact and language change
- The evolution of tonally conditioned allomorphy in Triqui: evidence from spontaneous speech corpora
- Sound change and gender-based differences in isolated regions: acoustic analysis of intervocalic phonemic stops by Bora-Spanish bilinguals
- Place uniformity and drift in the Suzhounese fricative and apical vowels
- Flexibility and evolution of cue weighting after a tonal split: an experimental field study on Tamang
- The emergence of bunched vowels from retroflex approximants in endangered Dardic languages
- The expanding influence of Thai and its effects on cue redistribution in Kuy
- Speech style variation in an endangered language
- Sound change in Aboriginal Australia: word-initial engma deletion in Kunwok
- The dental-alveolar contrast in Mapudungun: loss, preservation, and extension
- Sound change or community change? The speech community in sound change studies: a case study of Scottish Gaelic
- Phonetic transfer in Diné Bizaad (Navajo)
- The evolution of flap-nasalization in Hoocąk
- Sound change and tonogenesis in Sylheti
- Exploring variation and change in a small-scale Indigenous society: the case of (s) in Pirahã
- Rhotics, /uː/, and diphthongization in New Braunfels German
- Generational differences in the low tones of Black Lahu
