Lexical Tones in Sylheti Amalesh Gope, Shakuntala Mahanta Phonetics and Phonology Lab, Department of HSS, IIT Guwahati, India g.amalesh@iitg.ernet.in, smahanta@iitg.ernet.in Abstract In this paper we examine the status of lexical tones in Sylheti. Sylheti is generally considered to be one of the varieties of Bangla (belonging to the Indo-Aryan language family). The consonant inventory of Sylheti has undergone significant reduction and restructuring, and lost all the aspirated stops due to obstruent weakening ([b h ai>bai] „brother‟, [lat̪ h i> lat̪ i] „kick‟) and spirantization of the underlying voiceless bilabial stop (both aspirated and unaspirated) [p] and [p h ] ([por] > [ɸɔr] „read, [p h ul] > [ɸul] „flower) and voiceless velar stop (both aspirated and unaspirated) [k] and [k h ] ([kali] > [xali] „ink‟, [ [k h al > xal] „drain/channel‟). These processes gave birth to numerous homophones. Eight native speakers of Sylheti participated in a production experiment which recorded their utterances of 60 homophonous words (in a carrier sentence). However, in this paper we have concentrated only on the tonal properties of 24 monosyllabic words. The results show that the loss of breathy voice contrast and spirantization is compensated with a higher f 0 in the adjacent vowels. The result of one-way ANOVA shows a highly significant effect of tone on f 0 (measured at various points such as f 0 at vowel mid-point (measured in Mel) p < 0.05, [F (1, 414) = 67.06, p = 0.00)], max pitch (measured in Mel) p < 0.05, [F (1, 414) = 26.21, p = 0.00], min pitch (measured in Mel) p < 0.05, [F (1, 414) = 40.83, p = 0.00], average pitch (in Mel) p < 0.05, [F (1, 414) = 48.18, p = 0.00]. Index Terms: Sylheti, [+spread glottis], spirantization, homophone, tone, tonogenesis, production, perception. 1. Introduction Sylheti is generally regarded as a variety of (Eastern) Bangla (Grierson 1928, Chatterjee 1971) (belonging to the Indo- Aryan language family). The language is spoken by approximately 10,300,000 people (7,000,000 in Bangladesh) (Lewis et al. 2013). The language is primarily spoken in Sylhet District (also known as Surma Valley comprising of districts like Sylhet, Habiganj, Maulvi Bazar, and Sunamganj) located in the north-eastern region of Bangladesh. In India, a considerable amount of Sylheti speakers inhabit the northeast state of Assam (the Barak Valley region comprising districts such as Cachar, Karimganj and Hailakandi) and Tripura (primarily the northern districts such as Dharmanagar, Kailasahar and Kumarghat) No studies had been conducted on Sylheti at any (linguistic) level in general, and tone in particular. The distinct phonetic and phonological property distinguishes this variety from Standard Colloquial Bangla (henceforth SCB). One of the properties that distinguish Sylheti from SCB or other regional varieties is the significant application of obstruent weakening involving de-aspiration and spirantization. Consequently, the consonant inventory (especially the obstruents), of Sylheti exhibit a major reduction and restructuring compared to that of SCB. The loss of (underlying) breathiness contrast [+spread glottis] of the entire stop series due to the phonological process of obstruent weakening eventually led to deaspiration of voiced ([b h ai>bai] „brother‟, [lab h > lab] „profit‟) and voiceless stops ([t̪ h ala>t̪ ala] „plate‟ [lat̪ h i> lat̪i], „kick‟). Further, the process of spirantization targeting the underlying voiceless bilabial stop (both aspirated and unaspirated) [p] and [p h ] ([por] > [ɸɔr] „read, [p h ul] > [ɸul] „flower) and voiceless velar stop (both aspirated and unaspirated) [k] and [k h ] ([kali] > [xali] „ink‟, [ [k h al > xal] „drain/channel‟) reduced and restructured the phoneme inventory of the language. These processes gave birth to numerous homophones. Considering the unique linguistic properties such as phoneme inventory, allophony, and inflectional morphology in particular and lexicon in general, Sylheti is often regarded as a separate language (Grierson 1928, Chatterjee 1939, Gordon 2005). The languages of Indo-Aryan language family are not generally recognized for tone [Punjabi is known for two levels of tone; high and low (Bahl, 1957; Chatterji, 1969)]; however, the phonological processes of obstruent weakening and spirantization which eventually led to numerous homophones prompted us to investigate the tonal property of Sylheti. We conducted an acoustic experiment on 60 homophonous words with distinct lexical meanings (24 monosyllabic words, and 36 disyllabic words). Our findings confirm the presence of a two way tonal contrast in Sylheti. A high tone (marked) has emerged due to the loss of intended underlying feature [+spread glottis] which contrasts with a low tone (toneless or unmarked) occurring with every lexical entry. Statistical results suggest that the loss of [+spread glottis] among obstruents have been compensated with a significantly higher f 0 in the adjacent vowels. 2. Background The literature on tonogenesis reveals that the loss of one or the other laryngeal features such as voicing contrast, aspiration or breathiness contrast (also called murmur voicing), glottalization, etc. of adjacent consonants are the usual sources of tonal contrast. Generally voiced obstruents are known to lower the pitch of adjacent vowels (Hombert 1978, Maddieson 1977), and voiceless obstruents may even raise the pitch of neighbouring vowels (Hombert et al. 1979, Yip 2002). Researchers also speculate that tone arises from a toneless state (Abramson 2004) - a language therefore, may acquire or lose (lexical) tone due to areal effect (Gussenhoven 2004). Among the indo-Aryan languages, tonal specification in Punjabi is rather well established. In Punjabi, breathy voiced consonants lost the breathy specification and the vowel following it acquired a low tone (/b h a/→/p/) (Hombert, Ohala & Ewan 1979, Vijayakrishnan 2009, Bhaskararao 1998, Bhatia 1975). Presence of a high tone as a result of deaspiration in the syllable sequence of #BHV (initial breathy voiced consonant followed by a vowel), #HV, and VBH# (syllable containing a vowel and a breathy voiced consonant in the word boundary) was reported to be present in a few other Indo-Aryan languages such as Northern Haryanvi, Mandeli and so on (Bhaskararao 1998). However, the plausible phonetic reason related to the presence of a high tone in those languages seemed elusive. ISCA Archive http://www.isca-speech.org/archive 4 th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL-2014) Nijmegen, The Netherlands May 13-16 2014 TAL 2014 10