The ecology of variation and change in the context of language attrition
ʔuzãʔ (Chichimec) vowels
Language attrition arises in sociocultural niches which are less than optimal for the survival of a speech
community. Analogously to what happens with species in nature, the risk of extinction and the evolution of their systems are
determined by internal and external conditions as well by the extent of their impact over the population. Changes in the vitality
and maintenance of the language and transformations of its structural properties are partly a response to broader and more general
socio-historical factors. This paper discusses striking differences of the phonological system of contemporary ʔuzãʔ (Otomanguean)
with respect to descriptions made at the beginning of the 20th century. A detailed phonetic description of the variation and
change of the sound patterns in ʔuzãʔ are explained as a function of a general process of language obsolescence. It is claimed
that the same ecological predictors of extinction for natural species account for the decline of the language.
Article outline
- 1.Prolegomenon
- 2.Introduction
- 2.1Social context and language endangerment
- 2.2Anthropogenic factors of language attrition
- 3.Previous description and research
- 4.Methods, language data and recording protocol
- 5.Overview of the ʔuzãʔ sound system
- 5.1The phonetic properties of ʔuzãʔ vowels
- 5.2Vowels
- 5.3Oral vowels
- 5.4Oral breathy vowels
- 5.5Oral laryngealized vowels
- 5.6Nasal vowels
- 5.6.1Variation and vowel space
- 5.6.2Nasal coarticulation
- 6.Summary and discussion
- 6.1Oral vowel space: Witnessing sound change in progress
- 6.2Non-modal vowels
- 6.3Nasal vowels
- 7.Concluding remarks
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References
References
Austin, P. K.
ed. 2010 Lectures in Language Documentation and Description. Language Documentation and Description 71. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
Austin, P. K. and J. Sallabank
eds. 2011 The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Books Online.
Avelino, H.
2016 A cross-linguistic study of laryngeal contrast: Phonation and tone. In
H. Avelino,
M. Coller, and
L. Wetzels, eds.
Laryngeal Features in Languages of the Americas. Languages of the America. Leiden/ Boston: Brill. 10–50.
Avelino, H., M. Coller, and L. Wetzels
eds. 2016 Laryngeal Features in Languages of the Americas. Languages of the Americas. Leiden/ Boston: Brill.
Baayen, R., R. Piepenbrock, and L. Gulikers
1995 CELEX. LDC96L14. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.
Blankenship, B.
2002 The timing of nonmodal phonation in vowels.
Journal of Phonetics 301: 163–191.
Boersma, P. and D. Weenink
2015 Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer (
version 5.1.13).
Cardillo, M., G. M. Mace, J. L. Gittleman, K. E. Jones, J. Bielby, and A. Purvis
2008 The predictability of extinction: Biological and external correlates of decline in mammals.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B: Biological Sciences 275(1641): 1441–1448.
Crystal, D.
2002 Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwin, C. L.
1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed., Volume 11. London: John Murray.
[URL]
Davies, T. J., S. A. Fritz, R. Grenyer, C. D. Orme, J. Bielby, O. R. Bininda-Emonds, M. Cardillo, K. E. Jones, J. L. Gittleman, G. M. Mace, and A. Purvis
2008 Phylogenetic trees and the future of mammalian biodiversity.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 Suppl 11: 11556–11563.
De Angulo, J.
1933 The Chichimeco language (Central Mexico).
International Journal of American Linguistics 7(3/4): 152–194.
Diamond, J.
2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin Group.
Dirección General de Educación Indígena
2014 Educación básica indígena: gestión con resultados. Technical report. Mexico City.
Esposito, C. M.
2010 The effects of linguistic experience on the perception of phonation.
Journal of Phonetics 38(2): 303–316.
Evans, N.
2009 Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
Garellek, M.
2011 The timing and sequencing of coarticulated non-modal phonation in English and White Hmong.
Journal of Phonetics 40(1): 152–161.
Garellek, M. and P. Keating
2011 The acoustic consequences of phonation and tone interactions in Jalapa Mazatec.
Journal of the International Phonetic Association 411: 185–205.
Gippert, J., N. Himmelmann, and U. Mosel
eds. 2006 Essentials of Language Documentation. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs, Number 178. Berlin; Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gordon, M. K. and P. Ladefoged
2001 Phonation types: A cross-linguistic overview.
Journal of Phonetics 29(4): 383–406.
Grenoble, L. A. and L. Furbee
Grenoble, L. A. and L. J. Whaley
eds. 1998 Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hammarström, H., R. Forkel, M. Haspelmath, and S. Bank
2015 Glottolog (
version 2.4). Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
[URL]. Accessed 2018-06-08.
Heine, B. and M. Brenzinger
2003 UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages. UNESCO.
Herrera Zendejas, E.
2009 Formas sonoras: mapa fónico de las lenguas mexicanas. Mexico City: El Colegio de México.
Himmelmann, N. P.
2006 Language documentation: What is it and what is it good for? In
J. Gippert,
N. P. Himmelmann, and
U. Mosel, eds.
Essentials of Language Documentation. Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs, Number 178. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1–30.
Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática
2010 Censo de población y vivienda 2010.
Keating, P., C. Esposito, M. Garellek, S. ud Dowla Khan, and J. Kuan
2011 Phonation contrasts across languages.
Proceedings of ICPhS 2011, 1046–1049.
Keating, P., J. Kuang, C. Esposito, M. Garellek, and S. ud Dowla Khan
2012 Phonation in nine languages.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 131(4): 3347–3347.
Labov, W.
2010 Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol 2. Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ladefoged, P.
1988 Discussion of phonetics: A note on some terms for phonation types. In
Osamu Fujimura, ed.
Vocal Physiology: Voice Production, Mechanisms and Functions. New York: Raven Press, Ltd. 373–375.
Lastra, Y.
1970 El conejo y el coyote, cuento chichimeco.
Tlalocan. Revista de Fuentes para el Conocimiento de las Culturas Indígenas de México (6): 115–118.
Lastra, Y.
1971 Dos fiestas chichimecas.
Anales de Antropología (8): 203–212.
Lastra, Y.
1999 La vitalidad del chichimeco jonaz. In
Y. Lastra and
A. Harzfeld, eds.
Las causas sociales de la desaparición y del mantenimiento de las lenguas en las Naciones de América. Hermosillo: Universidad de Sonora. 51–76.
Lastra, Y.
2009b Vocabulario piloto chichimeco. Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Mexico City: UNAM.
Lastra, Y.
2011 Dos cambios fonológicos en curso en chichimeco. In
P. M. Butragueño, ed.
Realismo en el análisis de corpus orales: Primer Coloquio de Cambio y Variación Lingüística,
Cátedra Jaime Torres Bodet. Estudios de Lingüística. México City: El Colegio de México. 83–92.
Lastra, Y.
2012 Recent changes in Chichimec. In
O. Hitomi,
C. Stroh, and
A. Urdze, eds.
More Morphologies, Contributions to the Festival of Languages, Volume 351 of Diversitas Linguarum, 23–35. Bremen: Universittsverlag Brockmeyer.
Lastra, Y.
2014 La morfología verbal del chichimeco según Angulo y la actual. In
P. M. Butragueño and
L. Orozco, eds.
Argumentos cuantitativos y cualitativos en sociolingüística. Segundo Coloquio de Cambio y Variación lingüística. México City: El Colegio de México. 521–536.
Lastra, Y.
2015 Los hablantes de chichimeco jonaz a través de la historia.
UniverSOS 121: 14–91.
Lastra de Suárez, Y.
1984 Chichimeco jonaz. In
N. A. McQuown, ed.
Linguistics. Volume 2 of Supplement to the Handbook of Middle American Languages. Austin: University of Texas Press. 20–42.
Levy, E. S.
2009 On the assimilation-discrimination relationship in American English adults’ French vowel learning.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 126(5): 2670–2682.
Lindblom, B. and I. Maddieson
1988 Phonetic universals in consonant systems. In
C. Li and
L. M. Hyman, eds.
Language, Speech and Mind. London: Routledge. 62–78.
Martinet, A.
1955 Économie des changements phonétiques.
Traité de phonologie diachronique, Volume X1 of Bibliotheca Romanica, Manualia et Commentationes. Berne: A. Fracke.
Mufwene, S. S. and C. B. Vigouroux
Nettle, D. and S. Romaine
2002 Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Palancar, E. L. and H. Avelino
2015 Inflectional complexity and verb classes in Chichimec. In
E. L. Palancar,
M. Baerman, and
T. Feist, eds.
Inflectional Complexity: New Lights from the Oto-Manguean Languages of Mexico.
[URL]. Accessed 2017-05-17.
Price, S. A. and J. L. Gittleman
2007 Hunting to extinction: Biology and regional economy influence extinction risk and the impact of hunting in artiodactyls.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 274(1641): 1845–1851.
Purvis, A.
2008 Phylogenetic approaches to the study of extinction.
Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 391: 301–319.
Purvis, A., M. Cardillo, R. Grenyer, and B. Collen
2005 Correlates of extinction risk: Phylogeny, biology, threat and scale. In
A. Purvis,
J. L. Gittleman, and
T. Brooks, eds.
Phylogeny and Conservation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 295–316.
Reynolds, J. D.
2003 Life histories and extinction risk. In
T. M. Blakburn and
K. J. Gaston, eds.
Macroecology: Concepts and Consequences. The 43rd Annual Symposium of the British Ecological Society, held at the University of Birmingham, 17–19 April 2002. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 195–217.
Reznick, D. N. and R. E. Ricklefs
2009 Darwin’s bridge between microevolution and macroevolution.
Nature 457(7231): 837–842.
Robins, R. H. and E. M. Uhlenbeck
eds. 1991 Endangered Languages. Oxford: Berg.
Romero Castillo, M.
1958 Los fonemas del chichimeco-jonaz.
Análes del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia XI1: 289–297.
Schmid, M. S.
2011 Language Attrition. Key Topics in Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scicon R&D Inc.
2015 Pcquirer and x16 series hardware system.
[URL]
Seliger, H. and R. Vago
1991 First Language Attrition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverman, D., B. Blankenship, P. Kirk, and P. Ladefoged
1995 Phonetic structures in Jalapa Mazatec.
Anthropological Linguistics, 70–88.
Soriano, Fray Guadalupe
1767 Tratado del Arte y unión de los idiomas otomí y pame; vocabularios de los idiomas pame, otomí, mexicano y jonaz.
Yolanda Lastra, ed. 2012 Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Soustelle, J.
1937 La famille Otomí-Pame du Mexique Central. Paris: Institute D’Ethnologie.
Sutherland, W. J.
2003 Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species.
Nature 423: 276–279.
Vitousek, P. M., M.H.A., J. Lubchenco, and J. M. Melillo
1997 Human domination of earth’s ecosystems.
Science 277(5325): 494–499.
Woodbury, A. C.
2011 Language documentation. In
P. K. Austin and
J. Sallabank, eds.
The Cambridge Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 159–186.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Jin, Xianping, Minsheng Fan & Li Wang
2023.
2023 International Symposium on Educational Technology (ISET),
► pp. 138 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 3 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.