Spanish contact influence in a Finnish heritage community in Misiones, Argentina

This study examines contact outcomes in Finnish spoken in a heritage community in Misiones province, Argentina, in the 1970s. The data show limited morphosyntactic differences from dialectal varieties of Finnish, and most of the Spanish influence is lexical loans or sporadic codeswitches that have an emphatic function. The results show that beyond established lexical loans, both fluent and less fluent speakers avoid mixing and comment on it when it occurs. Translation and word search strategies show evidence of the speakers’ awareness about language mixing in the interview setting in which data were collected.

Performance of Bimanual Finger Coordination Tasks in Speakers Who Stutter

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental speech disorder characterized by the symptoms of speech repetition, prolongation, and blocking. Stuttering-related dysfluency can be transiently alleviated by providing an external timing signal such as a metronome or the voice of another person. Therefore, the existence of a core motor timing deficit in stuttering has been speculated. If this is the case, then motoric behaviors other than speech should be disrupted in stuttering. This study examined motoric performance on four complex bimanual tasks in 37 adults who stutter and 31 fluent controls. Two tasks utilized bimanual rotation to examine motor dexterity, and two tasks used the bimanual mirror and parallel tapping movements to examine timing control ability. Video-based analyses were conducted to determine performance accuracy and speed. The results showed that individuals who stutter performed worse than fluent speakers on tapping tasks but not on bimanual rotation tasks. These results suggest stuttering is associated with timing control for general motor behavior.

Modelling stylistic variation in threatened and under-documented languages

The centrality of style is uncontested in sociolinguistics: it is an essential construct in the study of linguistic variation and change in the speech community. This is not the case in the language-obsolescence literature, where stylistic variation among endangered-language speakers is described as an ephemeral, or “marginal” resource, and where speakers exhibiting “stylistic shrinkage” become “monostylistic”. This argument is invoked in variationist theory too, where “monostylism” is presented as support for the tenets of Audience Design (Bell 1984). This article reports on a study that adopts variationist methods in a context of severe language endangerment. Evidence from two linguistic variables in Francoprovençal demonstrates the presence of socially meaningful stylistic variation among the last generation of fluent speakers, offering counter-evidence to classic claims. This evidence is used to argue that accounts of stylistic variation in language obsolescence are not sufficiently nuanced and should be reconsidered in light of recent research.

Kejom (Babanki)

Kejom [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m], the preferred autonym for the language more commonly known as Babanki, is a Central Ring Grassfields Bantu language (ISO 693-3: [bbk]) spoken in the Northwest Region of Cameroon (Hyman 1980, Hammarström et al. 2017, Simons & Fennig 2017). The language is spoken mainly in two settlements shown in Figure 1, Kejom Ketinguh [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m ↓kɘ́tÍⁿɡ̀uʔ] and Kejom Keku [k̀ɘd͡ʒɔ́m ↓kɘ́k̀u], also known as Babanki Tungoh and Big Babanki, respectively, but also to some extent in diaspora communities outside of Cameroon. Simons & Fennig (2017) state that the number of speakers is increasing; however, the figure of 39,000 speakers they provide likely overestimates the number of fluent speakers in diaspora communities. The two main settlements’ dialects exhibit slight phonetic, phonological, and lexical differences but are mutually intelligible. The variety of Kejom described here is the Kejom Ketinguh variant spoken by the second author; all data and examples which we take into account are based on his speech.

The mystery of the Votic inessive

This paper analyzes the morphophonological structure of the inessive singular forms in Liivtšülä-Luuditsa Votic. There are no fluent speakers of this variety; the research is based on the materials recorded in 2003–2016. The inessive singular forms demonstrate variation of the weak and strong grade stems, which is very untypical for a case form. In all other morphological cases, the distribution of weak and strong stems is very stable. The variation in the inessive stem is observed both in the examples from published sources on the Votic language, and in our field materials. The acoustic research has confirmed the variation. Additionally, in the strong grade stem we find a shorter geminate stop or affricate compared to other strong grade forms (in the paper, the inessive singular is compared to the inessive plural and partitive singular). We consider several hypotheses that could explain the variation and the shorter geminate. The conducted experiments do not confirm the role of the word structure as the primary factor defining the geminate length. We suggest that both the variation of stems and the shorter geminate might result from language contact. In the neighbouring Ingrian varieties, the inessive is built from the weak grade stem. Since all the last fluent speakers of Votic knew Ingrian to some extent, the Votic and Ingrian patterns might have mixed. It is probable that originally the variation was triggered by some other factors, and the increasing role of the language contact turned it into a dominant factor in the course of the 20th century. Kokkuvõte. Elena Markus ja Fedor Rozhanskiy: Vadja inessiivi mõistatus. Artiklis analüüsitakse ainsuse inessiivi morfofonoloogilist struktuuri Liivtšülä- Luuditsa vadja keeles. Selle keele soravaid kõnelejaid enam pole; uurimus põhineb 2003–2016 lindistatud materjalidel. Ainsuse inessiivi vormid näitavad nõrga- ja tugevaastmeliste tüvede varieerumist, mis on ühe käändevormi kohta väga ebatüüpiline. Kõikide teiste morfoloogiliste käänete puhul on nõrkade ja tugevate tüvede jaotus korrapärane. Inessiivi tüve varieerumist vaadeldakse nii varem avaldatud vadja keele allikates kui ka meie välitööde materjalides. Akustiline analüüs kinnitab tüvede varieerumist. Lisaks esineb tugevas astmes inessiivis lühem geminaatkonsonant või afrikaat kui teistes tugeva astme vormides (artiklis võrreldakse ainsuse inessiivi mitmuse inessiivi ja ainsuse partitiiviga). Me esitame mõned hüpoteesid, mis võiksid sellist varieerumist ja lühemat geminaati selgitada. Tehtud eksperimendid ei kinnita sõnastruktuuri rolli esmase faktorina geminaadi pikkuse defineerimisel. Me arvame, et nii tüvede varieerumine kui ka lühike geminaat võivad olla tingitud keelekontaktist. Naabruses olevates isuri murretes moodustatakse inessiiv nõrgaastmelisest tüvest. Kuna kõik viimased head vadja keele kõnelejad oskasid mingil määral isuri keelt, võisid vadja ja isuri keel olla segunenud. On tõenäoline, et algselt oli varieerumine tingitud teistest faktoritest, kuid keelekontakti suurenenud roll kujunes 20. sajandi jooksul domineerivaks.

The counterfactive mood in Forest Enets and its origin

The description of the counterfactive mood (Siegl 2013: 298) reported that this mood has fallen out of use in the speech of the last generation of fully fluent speakers. Although it is remembered and some examples from elicitation are attested, it could no longer be found in transcribed narratives representing the language of the last fully fluent speakers recorded between 2006 and 2011. By contrast, the counterfactive mood is very frequent in narratives from the parental generation on which this study is based. Apart from a functional description and an analysis, the article discusses the history of this mood. The article ends with a collection of thoughts concerning the history of the Proto-Samoyedic tense system, as this mood is historically closely connected to the Proto-Samoyedic aorist marker *-ŋå.

That’s thee, uuh blicket! How does disfluency affect children’s word learning?

Disfluencies, such as ‘um’ or ‘uh’, can cause adults to attribute uncertainty to speakers, but may also facilitate speech processing. To understand how these different functions affect children’s learning, we asked whether (dis)fluency affects children’s decision to select information from speakers (an explicit behavior) and their learning of specific words (an implicit behavior). In Experiment 1a, 31 3- to 4-year-olds heard two puppets provide fluent or disfluent descriptions of familiar objects. Each puppet then labeled a different novel object with the same novel word (again, fluently or disfluently). Children more frequently endorsed the object referred to by the fluent speaker. We replicated this finding with a separate group of 4-year-olds in Experiment 1b ( N = 31) and a modified design. In Experiment 2, 62 3- to 4-year-olds were trained on new words, produced following a disfluency or not, and were subsequently tested on their recognition of the words. Children were equally accurate for the two types of words. These results suggest that while children may prefer information from fluent speakers, they learn words equally well regardless of fluency, at least in some contexts.

Emergent sociolinguistic variation in severe language endangerment

ABSTRACTContrary to Labov's principle of style shifting, studies in language obsolescence portray speakers of dying languages as ‘monostylistic’, a characterization questioned here. Variationist methodology is adopted in a context of gradual language death. By combining quantitative and interactional analyses of data from older, younger, and new speakers of Francoprovençal in France and Switzerland, the article considers (a) to what extent variability in language obsolescence differs from that found in ‘healthy’ languages, and (b) how innovations might spread through communities speaking threatened languages characterized as ‘monostylistic’ and lacking overt normative infrastructure. It is argued that style variation (not monostylism) emerges from linguistic decay: among more fluent speakers, a categorical rule of /l/-palatalization before obstruents becomes underspecified, rendering palatalization available for strategic use. Among new speakers, novel palatal variants form part of an emergent sociolinguistic norm. The study offers fresh insights on the origins of sociolinguistic variation with implications for variationist theory. (Language obsolescence, language death, language variation and change, style variation, new speakers)*

Phonetics of Southern Ute vowels

This paper presents an acoustic study of the vowel system of Southern Ute, a Southern Numic Uto-Aztecan language spoken in southwestern Colorado. Previous auditory accounts proposed an inventory of five vowel phonemes that participate in three allophonic processes and contrast in length and stress. We investigate how the vowels are realized at the phonetic level by analyzing F1, F2, duration, spectral emphasis and f0 in over 6000 vowel tokens produced by eight fluent speakers (four female and four male). Our findings provide new phonetic detail for the earlier non-instrumental descriptions of the language, including both expected and previously unreported effects. We confirm the existence of five distinct phonemic categories but show that their prototypical phonetic realizations and positional allophones do not always match the earlier descriptions. We also describe how phonemic length and stress are marked in Southern Ute.