AN ACOUSTIC DESCRIPTION OF THE VOWEL SYSTEM OF SANTIAGO MEXQUITITLÁN OTOMI (HÑÄÑHO) Stanislav Mulík1, Mark Amengual2, Gloria Avecilla-Ramírez1, Haydée Carrasco-Ortíz1 1Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Mexico 2University oF CaliFornia, Santa Cruz, USA [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT study is the first to acoustically describe the Hñäñho oral vowel system. We discuss the oral vowel The Otomi language belongs to the Oto-Pamean inventory of four native speakers of Hñäñho from a branch of the Oto-Manguean languages in Mexico. small urban Hñäñho community in the city of The variety oF Otomi (Hñäñho) spoken in Santiago Santiago de Querétaro (Mexico), all of whom were Mexquititlán, Querétaro, is an endangered language born and raised in Santiago Mexquititlán. that is still largely unexamined from an instrumental There are 9 Otomi varieties, namely Mezquital point of view. The present study is the first to provide Otomi, Tilapa Otomi, Eastern Highland Otomi, an acoustic description of the Hñäñho vowel system. Tenango Otomi, Querétaro Otomi, Estado de México We report on the oral vowel inventory of Hñäñho by Otomi, Temoaya Otomi, Texcatepec Otomi, and means oF acoustic analyses oF production data From Ixtenco Otomi [15, 22]. According to UNESCO, 3 of four native speakers. While it is common For these varieties are considered “severely endangered”, moribund indigenous languages to lose phonemic 3 are “definitely endangered”, and 3, including the distinctions when in extensive contact with a majority Hñäñho variety spoken in the state of Querétaro, are language (i.e., Spanish), our results indicate that the catalogued as “vulnerable” [19]. Otomi speakers who vowel system of Hñäñho spoken in Santiago leave rural areas for larger cities are exposed to an Mexquititlán consists oF nine oral vowel phonemes, exclusively Spanish-speaking urban environment as maintaining all phonemic contrasts. This acoustic well as to negative attitudes towards them and their description provides novel data on an endangered language [10, 13, 24], which can lead to a complete language while also contributing to the growing body loss of the native language within as little as three of studies on cross-linguistic influence in the context generations [10]. of Mexican indigenous bilingualism. Linguistic features of the Otomi language are being lost due to extensive contact and shiFt towards KeyworDs: Otomi, Hñäñho, indigenous language, Spanish [13, 24]. Mexican Spanish has a symmetrical acoustic description, oral vowels. five-vowel system (/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/) and no nasal vowels. On the other hand, Otomi vowel 1 INTRODUCTION systems are usually comprised of a rich set of oral and nasal vowels [11, 20, 26]. The most common vowel Otomi belongs to the Otomian branch oF the system found across the nine Otomi varieties is one Oto-Pamean subdivision of the Oto-Manguean consisting of 9 oral vowels [2, 3, 4, 5, 17, 23], with an language family, spoken in central Mexico [26]. additional set of one to five nasal vowels [11]. Otomi from Santiago Mexquititlán, located in the In a situation of continuous language contact with Mexican state oF Querétaro, is referred to as Hñäñho Spanish, the potential influence that these vowel by its native speakers [14]. Hñäñho is spoken as a First systems might exert on each other is especially (L1) or second language (L2) almost exclusively by relevant. It is not infrequent for vowel systems to be Otomi Mexican indigenous people from the rural afFected in situations of language contact [1, 7, 12]. community of Santiago Mexquititlán. This language In the case of Otomi-Spanish language contact, the is largely underdescribed from an instrumental point Otomi vowel system exhibits a greater degree oF of view, which makes it diFFicult to predict complexity in comparison to the Spanish vowel cross-linguistic effects in native and heritage speakers system, and as a result of language contact there could of Hñäñho acquiring Spanish and/or other languages be a tendency towards simpliFication [18], in which in a situation of extensive language contact with phonemic contrasts in Otomi not present in Mexican Spanish in central Mexico. Spanish would be lost in the process of language shift Previous studies have described the Hñäñho vowel from Hñäñho to Spanish. system using impressionistic techniques [11, 14, 15]. However, it could serve a useFul purpose to compare 1.1 Hñäñho voweLs such descriptions with instrumental measurements of the Hñäñho vowel inventory obtained in a carefully There are very Few acoustic studies oF Otomi controlled experimental setting. Thus, the present varieties and these Focus mainly on suprasegmental features of the language, such as lexical prosody [26] received monetary compensation for taking part in the and tonal patterns [11]. Hñäñho has been described as study. having 9 oral vowels (Table 1) and one nasal vowel /ã/ [11, 14, 15]. The description of Hñäñho vowels in 2.2 MateriaLs Table 1 is based on minimal pairs; however, no acoustic measurements were perFormed. These A list oF 81 common disyllabic Hñäñho nouns was phonological transcriptions will benefit From acoustic extracted From a Hñäñho-Spanish dictionary [14]. data in order to confirm that these vowel contrasts are The list was careFully designed to contain three phonemic in the production of Hñäñho native diFFerent nouns For each one of the 27 possible speakers. Acoustic studies describing vowel systems vowel-tone combinations (9 oral vowels × 3 tones × of other Otomi varieties are also extremely scarce 3 nouns = 81). All nouns on the list were corroborated (but see [23] for a thesis on Acazulco Otomi vowels). by a native speaker before being selected as target items in the production task. The list was randomized TabLe 1: Hñäñho oral vowels [11, 14, 15]. and split into two counterbalanced blocks. The target vowel in each experimental item Front Central Back appeared in stressed position, forming the nucleus of Close i ɨ u the first syllable. The syllabic structure oF all words Close-mid e ɘ o was (C)CV-(C)CV (target vowel in bold), typical of Open-mid ɛ ɔ disyllabic Otomi words [11, 20, 26]. Consonant Open a sounds directly preceding and following the target vowel included stops, Fricatives, and afFricates. As in other Otomi varieties, Hñäñho vowels can Words with nasal and lateral consonants were carry three tones: low, high, and rising [14, 15]. The avoided since they can complicate vowel formant study of the tone system of Hñäñho is beyond the measurements [16]. scope of this paper; however, the possible effects of 2.3 RecorDing proceDure vowel tones were controlled For in the list of experimental stimuli (see section 2.2 Materials for The oral production recording was conducted more details). Despite the lack oF consensus on the individually in a sound-attenuated booth with interaction of the tonal and accentual phenomena in participants comFortably seated at the same table as Otomi, disyllabic words seem to mostly be stressed the experimenter. The production of the target on the First syllable, regardless of the tone [11, 26]. Hñäñho vowels was elicited by a Spanish-Hñäñho The main goal of this study is to acoustically translation task. Participants were asked to provide 1 describe the Hñäñho oral vowels . Moreover, we Hñäñho translations of Spanish words by embedding seek to determine whether phonemic contrasts them in a carrier phrase, Dí mää ar targetword gatho between the Hñäñho vowels, as previously described ya pa ‘I say the targetword every day’. impressionistically [11, 14, 15], are maintained in the The speech samples were recorded using a oral production of native speakers or if Hñäñho head-mounted microphone (Shure SM10A) and a phonemic categories are merging due to the influence solid-state digital recorder (Marantz PMD660), of Spanish. digitized (44 kHz, 16 bit quantization), and computer-edited For subsequent acoustic analysis. 2 METHOD Three repetitions oF the 81 words embedded in the carrier phrase yielded 243 target vowel tokens per 2.1 Participants participant. FiFty-nine tokens were excluded from the Four native speakers of Hñäñho (two males and two analysis due to mispronunciations or recording errors, females) were recruited For this study. Their ages resulting in a total of 913 tokens. ranged from 54-69 (M=62.0, SD=6.2). Participants 2.4 Acoustic anaLysis reported that Hñäñho was their only mother tongue; however, all of them were also very proficient Vowels were segmented using synchronized Spanish speakers. They started learning Spanish at waveForm and spectrographic displays in Praat [6]. the age of 7-17 years old (M=13.3, SD=4.3), when Formant trajectories as well as intensity displays were they left their rural home community in Santiago taken as indicators of vowel onsets and offsets. Vowel Mexquititlán to move to Santiago de Querétaro. formant measurements (F0, F1, F2) were However, they use Hñäñho on a daily basis with their automatically extracted at the center of the vowel family members, acquaintances, and co-workers. steady-state period. Formant tracks were calculated All participants reported normal speech and with the Burg algorithm as implemented in the Praat hearing. They signed an informed consent form and program. The effective window length for the calculation was set at 25 ms and was maintained across tokens and speakers. The maximum number oF 3 RESULTS formants to be located by the formant tracker was always Five, and the ceiling was set at 5.0 kHz For Figure 1 shows Four vowel plots of F1 (y axis) and F2 males and 5.5 kHz For females. These gender-specific values (x axis) at the vowel midpoint For the nine formant ceilings reflect the diFFerent average vocal Hñäñho oral vowels, as produced by the Four tract lengths of men versus women and were deemed participants. Mean F1 and F2 values are plotted as appropriate after visual inspection of the sound files.