1 Northern Tosk Albanian 1 1 2 Stefano Coretta , Josiane Riverin-Coutlée , Enkeleida 1,2 3 3 Kapia , and Stephen Nichols 1 4 Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, 5 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München 2 6 Academy of Albanological Sciences 3 7 Linguistics and English Language, University of Manchester 8 29 July 2021 9 1 Introduction 10 Albanian (endonym: Shqip; Glotto: alba1268) is an Indo-European lan- 11 guage which has been suggested to form an independent branch of the 12 Indo-European family since the middle of the nineteenth century (Bopp 13 1855; Pedersen 1897; Çabej 1976). Though the origin of the language has 14 been debated, the prevailing opinion in the literature is that it is a descend- 15 ant of Illyrian (Hetzer 1995). Albanian is currently spoken by around 6–7 16 million people (Rusakov 2017; Klein et al. 2018), the majority of whom 17 live in Albania and Kosovo, with others in Italy, Greece, North Macedonia 18 and Montenegro. Figure 1 shows a map of the main Albanian-speaking 19 areas of Europe, with major linguistic subdivisions according to Gjinari 20 (1988) and Elsie & Gross (2009) marked by different colours and shades. 21 At the macro-level, Albanian includes two main varieties: Gheg, 22 spoken in Northern Albania, Kosovo and parts of Montenegro and North 1 Figure 1: Map of the Albanian-speaking areas of Europe. Subdivisions are based on Gjinari (1988) and Elsie & Gross (2009). CC-BY-SA 4.0 Stefano Coretta, Júlio Reis. 2 23 Macedonia; and Tosk, spoken in Southern Albania and in parts of Greece 24 and Southern Italy (von Hahn 1853; Desnickaja 1976; Demiraj 1986; Gjin- 25 ari 1985; Beci 2002; Shkurtaj 2012; Gjinari et al. 2007). At the meso-level, 26 Gheg and Tosk are usually further divided into the following sub-varieties 27 (Gjinari 1988): Gheg includes Northwestern Gheg, Northeastern Gheg, 28 Central Gheg, and Southern Gheg; while Tosk includes Northern Tosk, 29 Southern Tosk, Cham, Arvanitika, and Arbëresh. The speakers recorded 30 for this illustration were all born and raised in areas where Northern Tosk 31 is spoken, namely the counties of Përmet and Fier. Thus, we consider 32 the doculect (Cysouw & Good 2013) discussed here to belong to Northern 33 Tosk. 34 The five consultant speakers (2 females and 3 males) wereaged 35 between 25 and 33 years old. They were recorded in Munich while read- 36 ing a word list, a list of sentences, and the North Wind and the Sun story. 37 Following the suggestion by Whalen et al. (2020) that more acoustic and 38 articulatory details be included as part of IPA Illustrations, here we dis- 39 cuss a set of widely-used measures pertaining to vowels and consonants as 40 complementary evidence to our impressionistic observations. Though we 41 recognise that this set is not exhaustive, we hope it may serve as a base 42 on which more thorough future work on Albanian may build. For a full 43 report of the methods employed in this study, the reader is referred to the 44 Appendix. 45 Following recommendations for Open Science in Crüwell et al. (2019) 46 and Berez-Kroeker et al. (2018), data and code used to produce the ana- 47 lyses discussed in this paper are available on the Open Science Framework 48 at https://osf.io/vry3h/ (Coretta et al. 2021). 3 Table 1: Phonemic consonants of Northern Tosk Albanian. Bilabial Labiodental Dental Alveolar Postalveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Glottal Plain Velarised Apical Laminal Plosive p b t d k ɡ Affricate ts dz tʃ dʒ t̻ʃ̻ d̻ʒ̻ Nasal m n ɲ Trill r Flap ɽ Fricative f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ h Approximant j Lateral approximant lˠ l 49 2 Consonants 50 p /pata/ pata ‘duck’ r /rapi/ rrapi ‘oak tree’ b /baɽi/ bari ‘grass’ ɽ /ɽaʃɜ/ rashë ‘I fell’ t /tapa/ tapa ‘cork’ f /fati/ fati ‘luck’ d /data/ data ‘date’ v /vata/ vata ‘epaulette’ k /kati/ kati ‘floor’ θ /θatɜ/ thatë ‘dry’ ɡ /ɡati/ gati ‘ready’ ð /ðatɜ/ dhatë ‘you gave’ ts /tsitsa/ cica ‘boobs’ s /salˠa/ salla ‘big room, hall’ dz /dzidza/ xixa ‘sparkles’ z /zalˠi/ zalli ‘pebbles’ tʃ /tʃaji/ çaji ‘tea’ ʃ /ʃava/ shava ‘I scolded’ dʒ /dʒaja/ xhaja ‘uncle’ ʒ /ʒaba/ zhaba ‘lizard’ t̻ʃ̻ /t̻ʃava/̻ qava ‘I cried’ h /hanɜ/ hanë ‘they eat’ d̻ʒ̻ /d̻ʒaku/̻ gjaku ‘blood’ j /janɜ/ janë ‘they are’ m /mana/ mana ‘mulberries’ l /lava/ lava ‘I washed’ n /nana/ nana ‘grandma’ lˠ /lˠava/ llava ‘lava’ 51 ɲ /ɲeɽka/ njerka ‘stepmother’ 52 The 29 phonemic consonants of Northern Tosk described here are 53 shown in Table 1. For each consonant, our description is based on the 54 consonant that occurs as the first segment of near-minimal pairs consist- 55 ing of trochaic words. The illustrative words are taken from Beci (2004), 56 with these exceptions: bari, xhaja, mana, nana, njerka, fati, vata, lava, 57 llava. Northern Tosk contrasts eight manners of articulation (as defined 58 in International Phonetic Association 1999): plosive, affricate, nasal, trill, 59 flap, fricative, approximant and lateral approximant. In total, there are 4 Figure 2: Segmentation of release and voice onset in /pata/ ‘duck’ and /kati/ ‘floor’, uttered by S04. Tiers from top to bottom: word, segments, C1 release, voice onset. 60 nine contrastive places of articulation: labial, labiodental, dental, alve- 61 olar, postalveolar, retroflex, palatal, velar and glottal. The postalveolar 62 place of articulation further contrasts apical and laminal articulators in 63 the affricates. Plosives, affricates and fricatives (with the exception of 64 /h/) contrast voiceless and voiced phonemes. 65 PLOSIVES Northern Tosk possesses six plosives: bilabial /p b/, 66 (apico-)alveolar /t d/ and velar /k ɡ/. Figure 2 shows an example of 67 the segmentation of stop release and voice onset in pata and kati. Fig- 68 ure 3 shows raw VOT values obtained for the initial plosive of the words 69 pata, bari, tapa, data, kati and gati as produced by the five speakers. Each 70 speaker repeated each word three times, so that there are three points per 71 speaker/consonant in the figure. The voiceless plosives /p t k/ have apos- 72 itive VOT, with /k/ being more post-aspirated (and more so for S05 than 5 Table 2: Mean VOT and standard deviation of word-initial plosive (15 tokens per word). word mean (ms) sd word mean (ms) sd pata 14 6 bari -108 27 tapa 15 10 data -117 19 kati 55 26 gati -106 23 73 other speakers). The mean VOT of /p/ is 14 ms (SD = 6), /t/ 15 ms (10), 74 /k/ 55 ms (26). The voiced plosives /b d ɡ/ have robust vocal fold vi- 75 bration during their closure (i.e. pre-voicing or negative VOT). Their VOT 76 values tend to show more intra- and inter-speaker variability than those 77 of the voiceless plosives. The mean VOT values are similar across these 78 consonants and they show greater standard deviations than the voiceless 79 plosives: /b/ -108 ms (SD = 26), /d/ -117 ms (19), /ɡ/ -106 ms (26). 80 FRICATIVES Northern Tosk has nine fricatives at the labiodental, dental, 81 alveolar, postalveolar and glottal places of articulation. In all places but 82 glottal, a voiceless fricative contrasts with its voiced counterpart. The 83 fricatives /f v/ are labiodental, /θ ð/ interdental, /s z/ (apico-)alveolar, 84 /ʃ ʒ/ (lamino-)postalveolar and /h/ (voiceless) glottal. The left panels 85 of Figure 4 show the spectral centre of gravity (CoG) of voiceless (top) 86 and voiced fricatives (bottom). As is seen cross-linguistically, /s z/ are 87 well separated from /ʃ ʒ/ in having a markedly higher CoG than the lat- 88 ter (see for example Maniwa et al. 2009 and references therein). Notably, 89 the labiodental and dental fricatives are not distinguished by CoG. This 90 is not surprising in light of the common sound change from dental to la- 91 biodental fricatives, as seen in varieties of English like Northern British 92 English (Baranowski & Turton 2015). 93 In the isolated words from the word list, the voicing contrast is con- 94 sistent and robust for all speakers: the voiceless fricatives show no passive 95 voicing from neighbouring segments and the voiced fricatives are usually 96 produced with vocal fold vibration throughout the entire consonant. How- 6 Figure 3: Voice-onset time (VOT) of voiceless and voiced plosives as meas- ured in the first consonant of pata, bari, tapa, data, kati and gati. VOT = 0 corresponds to the time of consonant release. Each speaker repeated each word three times (each repetition is represented by a dot in the figure). 7 Figure 4: Spectral centre of gravity of fricatives and affricates. 97 ever, the glottal fricative /h/ is at times realised as voiced [ɦ] in connected 98 speech, as can been seen in the phonetic transcription of The North Wind 99 and the Sun in Section 5 (e.g. /ðe meɲɜheɽɜ uðɜtaɽi/ [ðɛ miɲɜˈɦɛɹoθˈtaɽi]̞ 100 ‘and immediately the traveller’). 101 AFFRICATES The consonants represented by ⟨q⟩ and ⟨gj⟩ in writing are 102 traditionally described as plosives (Bevington 1971; Newmark et al. 1982; 103 Dodi 1996; Memushaj 2005, 2011; Jubani-Bengu 2011, 2012), though 104 Lowman (1932) classifies them as affricates and Belluscio (2014) reports 105 that they are realised with strong frication. In our data, in fact, they are 106 never realised as plosives and are instead clearly affricated for all speak- 107 ers. The waveforms and spectrograms of qava ‘I cried’ and gjaku ‘blood’ 108 as produced by speaker S04 are provided in Figure 5. From these it can 109 be seen that the plosive closure in word-initial position is followed by a 110 period of frication of substantial duration.