This Illustration focuses on Kua’nsi (kʰwa33n̩21si33, ISO639: ykn), a Central Ngwi (or Yi) language of the Sino-Tibetan family (Bradley 1997; Fan et al., 2017). It is spoken by approximately 5000 people in Liuhe Township (六合乡, Liùhé Xiāng), Heqing County (鹤庆县, Hèqìng Xiàn), Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China (see the map in Figure 1). Kua’nsi people refer to themselves as Kua’eshi (夸萼氏 Kuà’èshì) in Chinese and other ethnic groups, Bai (白 Bái) and Han (汉 Hàn) people living in the county, call them as Baiyi people (白依人 Báiyīrén) in Chinese because of their white traditional clothes.

Zhongjiang Chinese (中江话) is a variety of Mandarin Chinese, one of the ten language families in China (Mandarin, Cantonese, Xiang, Min, Gan, etc.,). Sometimes the term “Mandarin” is also used to refer to the national lingua franca “Putonghua”. We refer to the national lingua franca as “Standard Mandarin” and reserve the term Mandarin (官话) to refer to the language family, as distinct from other families, e.g., Cantonese, Xiang, Min, Gan, etc. Within Mandarin, Zhongjiang is a member of the Southwestern dialects (西南官话) (Language Atlas of China 1988). It is spoken in the urban areas of Zhongjiang county (中江县) in Sichuan province (四川省 ) of China. Zhongjiang county belongs to the Deyang (德阳) region, which is located in the middle of Sichuan province, about 100 kilometers northeast from the provincial capital of Chengdu (成都). Zhongjiang is just beyond the Chengdu Plain (成都平原), so the terrain is mostly hilly, with little flat land. It has a population of 1.37 million residents and an area of 2,200km2 (data from Zhongjiang official website, updated July 7, 2021).

Apical vowels are widely observed across Chinese dialects, such as the rime of [sɹ̩55] ‘think’ in Mandarin Chinese, which is a syllabic approximant homorganic to its preceding sibilant. The apical vowels in Hefei Mandarin differ from those in Mandarin Chinese and most other languages in three aspects: (i) there are three phonetic apical vowels [ɹ̩], [ɹ̩ʷ], and [ɻ̩] while others usually have one or two, (ii) the alveolar apical [ɹ̩] appears after both homorganic and non-homorganic consonants, e.g. [sɹ̩] vs. [pɹ̩], and (iii) there is a phonological contrast between an unrounded apical [ɹ̩] and a rounded apical [ɹ̩ʷ], e.g. [sɹ̩] vs. [sɹ̩ʷ]. The articulatory properties of the three apical vowels were examined in this study using ultrasound techniques and the results revealed that: (i) the commonalities of tongue gestures for the apical vowels include a retracted tongue root, a lowered tongue dorsum or blade, or both, together with a coronal constriction implemented with the blade and/or the tip; (ii) lip gestures are involved in distinguishing the three apical segments; (iii) the three segments each have its distinct articulatory gestures within a speaker that cannot be simply attributed to the influence from their preceding consonants, with [ɹ̩] and [ɹ̩ʷ] involving a grooving in the front part of the tongue and [ɻ̩] involving a retraction of tongue body in the back region of the vocal tract; (iv) the articulatory gesture of [ɹ̩] after a homorganic consonant, e.g. in [sɹ̩], is similar to that after a non-homorganic consonant, e.g. in [pɹ̩], suggesting an independent articulatory target for this segment.

Using electroglottography and acoustic measures, we characterize the strength and quality of voicing in voiced aspirated and unaspirated consonants (stops, fricatives, and approximants) in Yemba (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon). We show that the Yemba voiced aspirates exhibit mixed voicing: modal voicing during the consonant constriction, but voiceless aspiration after release. Breathy or whispery phonation extends slightly into consonant constrictions preceding, and across the entire duration of vowels following, aspiration; this non-modal phonation extends further into prenasalized consonants. Mixed voicing has typically been excluded from the possible range of laryngeal–supralaryngeal coordinative patterns in consonants, and is thought to be unattested in the world’s languages; most previous work on this topic assumes that non-modal phonation after voiced consonant release is breathy-voiced. However, we argue that Yemba voiced aspirates differ from more commonly studied breathy-release aspirates only in the settings of some gestural parameters: the late glottal spread gesture is larger in magnitude and more resistant to coarticulation, yielding consistently devoiced aspiration which may even be more perceptually recoverable compared to breathiness.

San Martín Peras Mixtec (autonym: Tu’un Nta’vi or Tu’un Savi ) is an Otomanguean language spoken by roughly 11,500 people in the municipality of San Martín Peras, in Oaxaca, Mexico (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, 2020), as shown in Figure 1. The municipality is in the district of Juxtlahuaca, bordering the state of Guerrero. As of 2020, approximately 97% of the population of the municipality over three years old is a speaker of an Indigenous language. Of those that speak an Indigenous language, approximately 60% also speak Spanish, meaning that around 37% of the total population is monolingual in Mixtec (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, 2020). Despite these figures, it is difficult to estimate the total number of native speakers of the language, as many community members have migrated to other parts of Mexico and the United States, especially to several towns in California (Mendoza, 2020).

This paper investigates the production of dental and retroflex stops, fricatives, nasals, and laterals in the Dravidian language Kannada. This is done using articulatory contours extracted from an extensive midsagittal MRI corpus of two female Kannada speakers’ static vocal tract postures intended to capture key aspects of phonemic articulations. Articulatory modelling was used to determine a set of components responsible for the implementation of place and manner contrasts (/t̪ s̪ n̪ l̪/ vs. /ʈ ʂ ɳ ɭ/). These components included both lingual and non-lingual articulatory parameters. Constriction location and length were also determined based on articulatory contours. The results showed that the two speakers produced non-fricative retroflexes with a retracted tongue tip making a constriction behind the alveolar ridge and a characteristic convex tongue shape, yet without a retraction of the posterior portion of the tongue. Apart from the lingual parameters, place differences were also manifested by the vertical position of the larynx (lower for retroflexes). The realisation of the place contrast in sibilant fricatives was different, as /ʂ/ appeared to be produced by both speakers with a laminal alveolopalatal constriction. Manner differences were captured by various non-lingual parameters, yet being also manifested in constriction locations (more anterior for stops). These findings are discussed in the context of previous descriptive and articulatory accounts of dental-retroflex contrasts.

San Juan Piñas Mixtec (endonym: Tò’ō Ndá’ví; henceforth SJPM) (ISO 639-3: vmc) is a previously undocumented Oto-Manguean language of the Mixtecan branch spoken in the municipality of Santiago Juxtlahuaca in Oaxaca, Mexico (shown in the map in Figure 1). According to a 2020 census conducted by the Mexican government (INEGI 2020), there are 717 inhabitants in the town of San Juan Piñas, almost all of whom speak SJPM as their native language. Additionally, speakers are found in diaspora communities in the western states of Baja California (Mexico), California, Oregon, Washington, and other places in Mexico and the United States. There are about half a million speakers of all Mixtec varieties in Mexico (INEGI 2020), and between 100,000 and 150,000 speakers of Mixtec in California (Kresge 2007). While elderly speakers in San Juan Piñas tend to be monolingual, younger speakers are bilingual in SJPM and Spanish. In diaspora communities in the United States, younger SJPM speakers shift to English and/or Spanish as their primary language(s) of communication.

This study investigates interactions among relative syllabic prominence, initial geminates (IGs), and prosodic boundaries in Pattani Malay (PM) against a background of previous analyses claiming that IGs are moraic and trigger a ‘stress shift’ or the linking of a pitch accent to the initial syllable. We conducted an acoustic study with fourteen PM speakers, producing singleton–IG minimal pairs in naturalistic sentences. Our results show that the presence of IGs is not associated with the hypothesized phonological changes. Instead, it is associated with moderate increases in the duration of initial syllables, the intensity of the initial syllable vowels, and the f0 of the initial and final syllable vowels. On the other hand, the presence of a phrase-final prosodic boundary correlates with more drastic changes: in phrase-final position, final syllables exhibit final lengthening and falling contours of f0 and intensity, while, in the phrase-medial position, no lengthening is observed and f0 contours are rising. Furthermore, the effects of IGs are strongest in the phrase-final position, suggesting interactions between IGs and prosodic boundaries. Taken together, results cast doubts on the claim that IGs are moraic and associated with categorical differences in syllabic prominence profiles in PM and show that IG effects are modulated by prosodic boundaries.

In this paper, we examine the acoustics of vowels in the Imilike [ìmìlìkè] dialect of Igbo (Igboid, Niger-Congo), which has not previously been done. While Standard Igbo has eight vowels, previous auditorily-based research has identified eleven vowels in Imilike. Like Standard Igbo, Imilike contrasts vowels in Advanced/Retracted Tongue Root (ATR vs. RTR). We find that there are eleven vowels, distinguished most reliably by F1, B1, energy (dB) of voiced sound below 500Hz and duration. The results of this study also suggest that RTR vowels in Imilike might involve the laryngeal constriction and movement that accompany pharyngealization. The ATR and RTR schwas have similar phonological distribution and acoustic patterns as the other ATR and RTR vowels in the language.

In this paper, we investigate the prosodic realization of stress and focus in Udmurt (Uralic, Permic). According to the literature, Udmurt has fixed final stress, but also has several sets of morphosyntactic exceptions with initial stress. We report the results of two production studies. The first one targets nominals with final stress, and the second one investigates the stress properties of minimal pairs consisting of (i) indicative verbs (prs.3sg; final stress) and (ii) imperative verbs (imp.2sg/pl; initial stress). To control for the information-structural contexts, the test words are studied in contexts that elicit narrow focus either on the test word (‘F’ condition) or on another constituent (‘non-F’ condition). The results show that all four acoustic parameters surveyed in the paper – duration, intensity, fundamental frequency (f0), and first formant (F1) values – participate in stress marking in Udmurt. The results for focus marking vary by study and demonstrate that all cues except for intensity may be involved in focus marking. At the same time, we find wide interspeaker variation with respect to the acoustic cues marking stress and/or focus. Finally, we outline a preliminary Autosegmental-Metrical interpretation of our f0 results; a full account of Udmurt intonation awaits further research.

The stop inventory of Witzapan Nawat, a critically endangered indigenous language of El Salvador, has been traditionally described as consisting only of a voiceless series /p t k kw/. In this paper, I measure the voice onset time, consonant duration, and percent voicing in stops produced by five L1 Witzapan Nawat speakers. I find that, while /p t kw/ have acoustic characteristics of voiceless stops in practically all contexts, the velar stop in this language is better analyzed as a voiced velar stop /ɡ/ rather than /k/. This results in an asymmetrical and unusual stop system that is not predicted by some theories of phonemic inventory structure. For instance, markedness-based theories propose that /ɡ/ is more marked that /b d/ and predict that, if a language has one voiced stop, it would be /b/ or /d/ rather than /ɡ/. On the other hand, feature-systemic models predict that, if a language has a stop with the [+voice] feature at a given place of articulation, it will also tend to have this feature in stops at other points of articulation to maximize feature economy. The phonemic inventory of Witzapan Nawat contradicts these predictions. I explain the asymmetrical stop inventory of this language as the result of diachronic developments involving sound change and analogy, concluding that language change does not necessarily advance towards symmetry and that phonemic inventories are the reflection of their diachrony, as proposed by Evolutionary Phonology.