REGISTER IN EASTERN CHAM: PHONOLOGICAL, PHONETIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACHES A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Marc Brunelle August 2005 © 2005 Marc Brunelle REGISTER IN EASTERN CHAM: PHONOLOGICAL, PHONETIC AND SOCIOLINGUISTIC APPROACHES Marc Brunelle, Ph.D. Cornell University, 2005 The Chamic language family is often cited as a test case for contact linguistics. Although Chamic languages are Austronesian, they are claimed to have converged with Mon-Khmer languages and adopted features from their closest neighbors. A good example of such a convergence is the realization of phonological register in Cham dialects. In many Southeast Asian languages, the loss of the voicing contrast in onsets has led to the development of two registers, bundles of features that initially included pitch, voice quality, vowel quality and durational differences and that are typically realized on rimes. While Cambodian Cham realizes register mainly through vowel quality, just like Khmer, the registers of the Cham dialect spoken in south- central Vietnam (Eastern Cham) are claimed to have evolved into tone, a property that plays a central role in Vietnamese phonology. This dissertation evaluates the hypothesis that contact with Vietnamese is responsible for the recent evolution of Eastern Cham register by exploring the nature of the sound system of Eastern Cham from phonetic, phonological and sociolinguistic perspectives. Proponents of the view that Eastern Cham has a complex tone system claim that tones arose from the phonemicization of register allophones conditioned by codas after the weakening or deletion of coda stops and laryngeals. Based on phonetic and phonological evidence, I reject this claim. I also provide phonological evidence against the weaker claim that the two registers are evolving into two tones. I show that Eastern Cham register is realized through two redundant phonological features: a register feature, realized on onsets, and a tone feature, realized on rimes. Sociolinguistic results show that there is no robust correlation between the familiarity or the frequency of use of Vietnamese by individual speakers and the use of pitch or the maximization of the pitch range to distinguish registers. The centrality of pitch in the register distinction thus cannot be attributed to language contact in a straightforward way and a simplistic view of contact-induced change must be rejected. I show through a study of variability in the use of monosyllables that it is not direct contact with Vietnamese, but rather the destabilizing effect of Vietnamese culture and society on the balance between the various language varieties used in the community, that triggers language change. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Marc Brunelle received a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from Université de Montréal in 1995 and a master’s degree in linguistics, also from Université de Montréal, in 1998. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank Pr. Bùi Khánh Thế, from the University of Social Sciences of Hồ Chí Minh City, who helped me secure research authorizations, and Dr. Phú Văn Hẳn, a Cham linguist at the Institute of Social Sciences of Hồ Chí Minh City, who helped me prepare my wordlists and interview materials, proofread all my transcriptions and introduced me to many of his friends and relatives in Ninh Thuận and Hồ Chí Minh City. My fieldwork would not have been possible without their help and advice. I am indebted to all the Cham who accepted to work with me, even knowing that collaboration with a foreign researcher was not without risks. I would like to thank the personnel of the Trung Tâm Văn Hóa Chăm (Cham Cultural Center) and of the Ban Biên Soạn Sách Chữ Chăm (Committee for the Standardization of the Cham Script) for their help. I have a special thought for Lộ Minh Trại and Lưu Văn Đảo who treated me like a nephew and ran into so much trouble because of me. I also want to thank Nguyễn Văn Tỷ and Quảng Thành Chung for guiding me and introducing me to many consultants in the villages of Phước Nhơn and Hữu Đức, respectively. I am especially grateful to Nguyễn Văn Tỷ for his sharp insights on Cham society and culture and for our conversations in French whenever I felt homesick. All my gratitude goes to the Cham who warmly greeted me and answered my puzzling questions in Ninh Thuận, Bình Thuận, Châu Đốc and Hồ Chí Minh City. This dissertation would not have been possible without the help of my committee. I would like to thank John Wolff for forcing me to constantly question my assumptions on the sociolinguistic situation of Cham communities and for his moral support when the Vietnamese bureaucracy seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, Amanda Miller for the long hours spent in the lab figuring out why my scripts did not iv work and Draga Zec for her great advice about professional issues. Finally, I want to express my deepest gratitude to Abigail Cohn, whom I cannot thank enough for her unlimited availability, for her sharp comments and for always knowing before me what I was getting to. Special thanks to my friends Pittayawat Pittayaporn, Johanna Brugman, Tejaswini Deoskar, Anastasia Riehl and Gregory Mikaelian for various discussions about Cham, Southeast Asia and phonetics. I also have a special thought for my parents, who believed in me even in my periods of self-doubt, and to my friends and family in Montréal, Ithaca, Hồ Chí Minh City and Khánh Hải. This dissertation would not have been possible with their constant support. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction.............................................................................................1 1.1 Contact and tonalization.......................................................................................3 1.2 Distribution of Chamic languages........................................................................6 1.3 Overview of Cham History ..................................................................................8 1.3.1 Arrival on the Mainland ................................................................................9 1.3.2 Linyi (150-650) ...........................................................................................10 1.3.3 The kingdom of Champa (650-1471)..........................................................12 1.3.4 Pānóuranga and the diaspora (1471-1883)..................................................14 1.3.5 French colonial period (1883-1954)............................................................15 1.3.6 Since independence (1954-present).............................................................16 1.3.7 Champa as a multiethnic confederation ......................................................18 1.3.8 Chamic and language contact......................................................................19 1.4 Sociolinguistic conditions ..................................................................................20 1.4.1 Intercultural relations and bilingualism.......................................................21 1.4.2 Quasi-diglossia ............................................................................................27 1.4.3 Language attitudes.......................................................................................34 1.4.4 Language shift and decay? ..........................................................................35 1.5 Chronology.........................................................................................................46 1.6 Overview of the dissertation...............................................................................48 Chapter Two: A sketch of Eastern Cham phonology and of the experimental methodology.................................................................................................................50 2.1 Phonology...........................................................................................................50 2.1.1 Word shapes ................................................................................................50 2.1.2 Vowels.........................................................................................................52 vi 2.1.3 Consonants ..................................................................................................54 2.1.4 Phonological register...................................................................................58 2.2 Methods ..............................................................................................................61 2.2.1 Fieldwork conditions...................................................................................61 2.2.2 Interviews and recordings............................................................................64 2.2.3 Wordlists......................................................................................................66 2.2.4 Acoustic analysis.........................................................................................70 2.2.5 Sociolinguistic analysis ...............................................................................71 Chapter Three: Codas and tones..................................................................................75 3.1 Previous work.....................................................................................................75 3.1.1 Tonogenesis in the literature .......................................................................76 3.1.2 Coda-conditioned