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Article published In:
Diachronica
Vol. 40:3 (2023) ► pp.384–432

A multifaceted approach to understanding unexpected sound change

The bilabial trills of Vanuatu’s Malekula Island

ORCID logo | Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
| Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
| University of Waikato
This paper demonstrates that unexpected sound changes are best explained by an approach that accounts for different motivations: phonetic, structural and social. Here, we focus on a multifaceted investigation of the cross-linguistically uncommon bilabial trills to show the complex interaction between different drivers of sound change. In this paper, we highlight and examine the prenasalized voiced bilabial trill mʙ and plain voiceless bilabial trill p [ʙ̥] found in a number of Oceanic languages spoken on Malekula Island in Vanuatu. We offer a comparative-historical analysis, and we identify the various forces that have led to the emergence and persistence of mʙ and p in Malekula languages: the historical articulatory environments, the particular make-up of the consonant inventories of these languages, complementary sound changes and phonological processes, contact with non-Austronesian languages, and in-group identity attachment. Furthermore, we offer a hypothesis for the relative timing of these factors on the historical pathway of Malekula’s bilabial trills.
Keywords: bilabial trills, sound change, Vanuatu, Malekula, prenasalization, Austronesian, Austronesian-Papuan contact, language and identity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Geographic distribution of bilabial trills
    • 2.2Phonetic and phonological properties of ᵐʙ and p
  • 3.Bilabial trills in Malekula languages
    • 3.1Existing hypotheses of the origins of Malekula’s bilabial trills
      • 3.1.1 Maddieson’s (1989) aerodynamic hypothesis
      • 3.1.2 Lynch’s (2016) diachronic analysis of bilabial trills in four Malekula languages
      • 3.1.3 Olson’s (2015) stop > trill > fricative hypothesis
      • 3.1.4Sound change motivated by contact
    • 3.2Distribution of bilabial trills on Malekula
    • 3.3Properties of Malekula’s bilabial trills
      • 3.3.1The prenasalized trill ᵐʙ
      • 3.3.2The plain trill p
      • 3.3.3Functional load of Malekula’s bilabial trills
  • 4.Comparative-historical analysis of Malekula’s bilabial trills
    • 4.1Cognate sets with ᵐʙ
    • 4.2Cognate sets with p
  • 5.Discussion of the results
    • 5.1*ᵐb/_u > ᵐʙ
    • 5.2*v/+_u > p
    • 5.3What contributed to the emergence and persistence of ᵐʙ?
    • 5.4What contributed to the emergence and persistence of p ?
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
  • References to Appendices
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 6 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.21051.ran
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