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Contact effects on voice-onset time (VOT) in Patagonian Welsh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2018

Morgan Sleeper
Morgan Sleeper*
Affiliation:
Macalester College msleeper@macalester.edu
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Abstract

The effects of language contact extend well beyond the borrowing of lexical items, and can include morphosyntactic, phonetic, and phonological changes over time (Thomason & Kaufman 1998). One especially common structural outcome of long-term contact is phonetic transfer (Matras 2009: 222). The Welsh spoken in Patagonia, which has been in close contact with Spanish for the past 150 years, offers one example of this phenomenon: Jones (1984) observes that younger speakers of Patagonian Welsh may be developing unaspirated voiceless stops /ptk/ as a result of Spanish contact. This paper measures the voice-onset time (VOT) of the Welsh voiceless stops /ptk/ using contemporary conversational speech data from both Patagonia and Wales, for speakers in three age groups (0–29, 30–59, and 60+ years), to examine the effects of Spanish contact on Patagonian Welsh. Results indicate that the tendencies seen in Jones (1984) have held true, and in fact have generalized to become a feature of Patagonian Welsh for speakers of all ages: Patagonian speakers produce the Welsh stops /ptk/ with significantly shorter VOT than speakers from Wales. These results shed light on an important distinguishing phonetic feature of this understudied variety of Welsh, as well as the dynamics of language contact in action.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , August 2020 , pp. 153 - 167
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Copyright
© International Phonetic Association 2018

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References

Corpora

Bangor Patagonia Corpus. http://bangortalk.org.uk/. ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory & Practice. Bangor: University of Wales.Google Scholar
Bangor Siarad Corpus. http://bangortalk.org.uk/. ESRC Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory & Practice. Bangor: University of Wales.Google Scholar

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