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.
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).
© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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- 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
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- 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
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- Phonetic transfer in Diné Bizaad (Navajo)
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