Abstract Language endangerment is one of the most urgent issues of the twenty-first century. Languages are disappearing at unprecedented rates, with dire consequences that affect speaker communities, ...scientific community and humanity. There is impetus for understanding the nature of language endangerment, and we investigate where language endangerment occurs by performing network analysis on 3423 languages at various levels of risk. Macro-level analysis shows evidence of positive assortative mixing of endangerment statuses—critically endangered languages are surrounded by similarly endangered languages, indicating the prevalence of linguistic hotspots throughout the world. Meso-level analysis using community detection returned 13 communities experiencing different levels of threat. Micro-level analysis of closeness centrality shows that more geographically isolated languages tend to be more critically endangered. Even after accounting for the statistical contributions of linguistic diversity, the structural properties of the spatial network were still significantly associated with endangerment outcomes. Findings support that the notion of hotspots is useful when accounting for language endangerment but go beyond that to establish that quantifying spatial structure is crucial. Language preservation in these hotspots and understanding why endangered languages pattern the way they do in their environments becomes more vital than ever.
Increased cognitive load has been observed to correlate with decreased vocal fold perturbation, reduced additive noise, increased periodicity, and a higher rate of vocal fold vibration. The aim of ...this study was to explore whether vocal fold vibratory patterns can serve as an indicator of increased cognitive load in non-balanced bilingual speakers when they use their weaker language.
This is a comparative experimental study with a within-speaker design.
We recorded a total of 95 bilingual speakers of Low German (LG), which is an endangered language spoken in Northern Germany, and Standard High German (HG). Participants completed four tasks in both languages: engaging in free narration, description of a picture story, giving directions, and reading a narrative passage. For the last three tasks the difficulty levels were varied. Measurements included jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio (HNR), cepstral peak prominence (CPP), the proportion of creak, pitch level, and pitch span. Changes of voice characteristics were examined both in terms of the participants age and in terms of their language dominance. For the latter, we calculated a dominance score derived from age of acquisition, frequency of use, and self-perceived linguistic competence in the two languages.
Younger speakers showed a higher dominance of HG over LG, which decreased with age. Younger and more HG-dominant speakers exhibited lower jitter and shimmer, along with a higher HNR and a lower creak proportion in LG compared to HG. CPP and pitch level were higher in LG but showed little variation with age or language dominance. No clear effects on pitch span were observed. Overall, age was a slightly more reliable predictor than language dominance. Acoustic differences in voice quality were about equally detectable across the different speech tasks, while varying difficulty levels had minimal impact.
The variation in vocal fold vibratory patterns suggests that younger and more HG-dominant speakers experienced greater cognitive load when speaking LG. Given that increased cognitive load may negatively impact language usage, voice analysis opens up new possibilities for evaluating the future prospects of endangered languages.
The Phonological System of TumɁi Kilian, Kelly
Stellenbosch papers in linguistics plus,
05/2022, Letnik:
64, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
As part of a linguistic research team I recorded a Khoisan language currently spoken by three people in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. Since the variety of language spoken in this ...location is close to varieties of both the Khoekhoe and Tuu language families, the question of genetic affiliation and classification within the Khoisan language cluster becomes significant. Although reported to have significant lexical similarities due to intensive language contact (Güldemann 2006), extensive research provides evidence of numerous linguistic differences which distinguish between the varieties within the Khoisan families mentioned above (Beach 1938, Bleek 1930, Ladefoged & Traill 1994, Miller, Brugman, Sands, Namaseb, Exter & Collins 2007). Overall, this project attempts to answer the question: How unique is this undocumented language TumɁi in comparison to varieties of geographically neighbouring Khoisan language clusters? This comparative analysis is comprised of a detailed description of the vowel and consonant systems, as well as evidence of phonetic and phonological contrasts. The clear focus on the analysis of sound contrasts is a consequence of limited data due to speaker competence. As a result of intense incomplete acquisition and linguistic attrition, the consultants produce utterances using Khoisan content words within an Afrikaans framework (Killian 2009). Specific research questions include: What is the sound inventory of this language? Are there phonation or glottalization contrasts in vowels? Are there laryngeal contrasts in consonants? What kinds of clicks make up the inventory? This project is a direct effort toward the revitalization and documentation of indigenous languages. Determining the genetic affiliations of this language which is positioned relatively equidistant to the surrounding languages, would also contribute to gaps within the linguistic isoglosses in South Africa.
Abstract A large percentage of the world’s languages – anywhere from 50 to 90% – are currently spoken in what we call shift ecologies, situations of unstable bi- or multilingualism where speakers, ...and in particular younger speakers, do not use their ancestral language but rather speak the majority language. The present paper addresses several interrelated questions with regard to the linguistic effects of bilingualism in such shift ecologies. These language ecologies are dynamic: language choices and preferences change, as do speakers’ proficiency levels. One result is multiple kinds of variation in these endangered language communities. Understanding change and shift requires a methodology for establishing a baseline; descriptive grammars rarely provide information about usage and multilingual language practices. An additional confounder is a range of linguistic variation: regional (dialectal); generational (language-internal change without contact or shift); contact-based (contact with or without shift); and proficiency-based (variation which develops as a result of differing levels of input and usage). Widespread, ongoing language shift today provides opportunities to examine the linguistic changes exhibited by shifting speakers, that is, to zero in on language change and loss in process, rather than as an end product.
•We examine lenition of obstruents in a spontaneous speech corpus of Yoloxóchitl Mixtec (ISO xty), a language with fixed stem-final stress and a complex tonal inventory.•Measures of duration, voicing ...during constriction, and allophone type were examined.•Onset obstruents of unstressed syllables are lenited more than onset obstruents of stem-final stressed syllables.•Duration is a strong predictor of the degree of lenition, but the functional status of the morpheme is also important.•Modeling of the reduced allophones with deep neural networks resulted in high accuracy in the detection of stop closure (>95%), and fairly high (>70%) accuracy in detecting highly frequent reduced allophones.
Word-level prosody plays an important role in processes of consonant lenition. Typically, consonants in word-initial position are strengthened while those in word-medial position are lenited (Keating, Cho, Fougeron, & Hsu, 2003). In this paper we examine the relationship between word-prosodic position and obstruent lenition in a spontaneous speech corpus of Yoloxóchitl Mixtec, an endangered Mixtecan language spoken in Mexico. The language exhibits a surprising amount of lenition in the realization of otherwise voiceless unaspirated stops and voiceless fricatives in careful speech. In Experiment 1, we examine the relationships between word position, consonant duration, and passive voicing and find that word-medial pre-tonic position is the locus of both consonant lengthening and less passive voicing. Non-pre-tonic consonants are produced with more voicing and shorter duration. We also find that the functional status of the morpheme plays a role in voicing lenition. In Experiment 2, we examine manner lenition and find a similar pattern – word-medial pre-tonic stops are more often realized with complete closure relative to non-pre-tonic stops, which are more often realized with incomplete closure. In Experiment 3, we model these lenition patterns using a series of deep neural networks and find that, even with limited training data, we can achieve reasonably high accuracy in the automatic categorization of lenition patterns. The results of this research both complement recent work on the phonetics of lenition in the world’s languages (Katz and Fricke, 2018; White et al., 2020) and provide computational tools for modeling and predicting patterns of extreme lenition.
