1. The phonetic and phonological effects of obsolescence in Northern Paiute

Molly Babel | University of California, Berkeley

Structural changes in a language are considered nearly inevitable consequences of language death (Campbell & Muntzel 1989; Wolfram 2002). The literature on sound change in endangered languages has focused on whether the changes are internally or externally motivated and, therefore, the difference between categorical sound shifts and gradient phonetic effects has been overlooked. This paper discusses sound change in Northern Paiute through two experiments that investigate the difference between categorical changes in the phonological inventory and subphonemic variation within a category. The paper argues that sound change in obsolescing languages may take one of two predictable paths: substitution or approximation/expansion of phonological categories in the moribund language.

Published online: 15 April 2009
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.25.03bab

Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

Babel, Molly, Andrew Garrett, Michael J. Houser & Maziar Toosarvandani

2013. Descent and Diffusion in Language Diversification: A Study of Western Numic Dialectology. International Journal of American Linguistics 79:4 ► pp. 445 ff.

Babel, Molly, Michael J. Houser & Maziar Toosarvandani

2012. Mono Lake Northern Paiute. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 42:2 ► pp. 233 ff.

Bird, Sonya

2020. Pronunciation among adult Indigenous language learners. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation

Bird, Sonya & Sarah Kell

2017. The Role of Pronunciation in SENĆOŦEN Language Revitalization. The Canadian Modern Language Review 73:4 ► pp. 538 ff.

Chirkova, Katia

2014. The Duoxu Language and the Ersu-Lizu-Duoxu relationship. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 37:1 ► pp. 104 ff.

Forker, Diana

2021. Complexity and Its Relation to Variation. Frontiers in Communication 6

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