Vowels in : introducing Godson 2004

Sophia A. Malamud

March 8, 2011

• Goal: to look at phonetic changes in Western Armenian as spoken in California, thus con- tributing to our understanding of both Western Armenian phonetics, and of language acqui- sition and change

• Specifically, to compare Heritage speakers (interrupted acquirers) with English L2 speakers (uninterrupted acquirers), and a single monolingual Western Armenian speaker

• Western Armenian is mostly a language of diaspora

– It is a ”definitely endangered” language according to UNESCO – The dialect has a number of systematic differences in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon from (the latter is the official language of the Republic of ); however, the two standards are mutually intelligible – The term first came into use after the division of Greater Armenia between the Byzantine Empire and Persia in 387 AD – Current usage mostly designates those parts of historical Armenia that remained part of the after Russo-Turkish war (19th century), and are now mostly in . – After the systematic massacres and deportations of in the late 19th - early 20th century, practically no speakers of Western Armenian remain in that territory

1 Phonetics in Studies of Language Change

• She claims that linguistic research is ”currently focused on lexical and morphosyntactic evi- dence” - not sure about this, as the classic sociolinguistic studies by e.g. William Labov, are largely focussing on phonetics, in fact! Perhaps language change in contact situations is meant.

• Petrovic 2001 looked at modern urban Serbian in contact with Balkan and Western European languages - accent system changed, also many more vowel and consonant clusters are now possible (perhaps due to loan words from media?) - not clear whether any claim is made for causes of prosodic changes.

• Other phonetic studies of language contact - Akka (1998): Arab in contact with Berber, Putzer and Barry (1998): German dialects in France.

1 • Sabino (1996) - use of phonetic analysis in language attrition: Negerhollands (a creole of Danish West Indies) gratually replaced by Virgin Island English Creole. Single bilingual Negerhollands speaker vs. phonetically transcribed corpus from 1923: length distinction for two of the vowels lost; otherwise same vowels as before, and distinct from the VIEC vowels.

1.1 Phonetics of Vowels • The vowel space can be thought of in terms of articulation - how forward or back in the mouth is the tongue? how high or low in the mouth is the tongue?

• The same vowel space can be thought of in terms of acoustics - what are the first two over- tones (formants) of the vowel sound?

• The chart that results from the two conceptions is (abstractly) the same: here is one for American English (averages for women, conservative style)

• Armenian has five vowels that are distinguished phonemically (make a difference in word meaning):

– high front (unrounded) /i/ – mid front (unrounded) / – low central (unrounded /a/ – high back (rounded) /u/ – mid back (rounded) /o/

• The neutral vowel schwa is inserted to prevent too many consonants from coming together, so that the syllables are CV(C), but makes no difference to word meaning

• Word stress is normally on the final syllable (compare with French) - for this study, vowels were all measured in a stressed position

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