Gawarbati (ISO 639-3: gwt; Glottocode: gawa2147) is an underdescribed Indo-Aryan language spoken along the Kunar River, in the southern part of Lower Chitral District of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province as well as in adjacent areas across the border in Nari (Naray) and Ghaziabad Districts of Afghanistan’s Kunar Province (see Figure 1). As for the number of speakers, only rough estimations can be given. On the Pakistani side of the border, where credible information is somewhat easier to obtain, local residents estimate it to be 4,000 speakers (Fazal Akbar, pc in 2022), based on the number of known Gawarbati speaking houses and an average number of household members. On the Afghan side of the border, the number appears to range between 15,000 and 20,000, based on recent cross-border contacts with local residents (Fazal Akbar, pc in 2022). This would amount to a total of 19,000–24,000 speakers of Gawarbati. A few small linguistic enclaves situated further down the Kunar Valley in Afghanistan are closely related to Gawarbati: Shumashti (Morgenstierne 1945: 241), Ningalami (Morgenstierne 1950: 58) and Grangali (Grjunberg 1971). Both Shumashti and Ningalami were at the verge of extinction already at the time of Morgenstierne’s field studies in the first half of the twentieth century, whereas Grangali is still spoken in three villages in the Digal Valley, according to a recent report (Robert Tegethoff and Sviatoslav Kaverin, pc in 2021).

The paper reports the results of an articulatory 3D/4D ultrasound study showing the variation in the production of corresponding high central(ized) unrounded vowels of Polish, Russian and Ukrainian. We provide qualitative descriptions of the articulation and quantitative analyses of the vowels, compared across the three languages, and compared with the other high vowels in the respective languages. In the analysis, we focus on the position of the dorsum and the tongue root. The Russian ‘central’ vowel (transcribed often as [ɨ]) is most often realized in our sample with a back position of the dorsum and a relatively fronted tongue root position. The corresponding Polish vowel (also transcribed often as [ɨ]) shows a fronted dorsum, though it is centralized in comparison to /i/. The corresponding Ukrainian central(ized) vowels (transcribed in Pompino Marschall, Steriopolo & Żygis 2016 as [ɪ]) shows a lot of variation but the dorsum usually is more retracted than in Polish and less than in Russian. The Russian vowel /ɨ/ shows systematic grooving along the center of the tongue in the tongue root area, indicating a strong involvement of the tongue root musculature. Such a grooving is inconsistent in Ukrainian speakers and minimal in Polish. In general, we observe that functionally corresponding vowels in closely related languages may differ in articulation, which may have an impact on the phonological systems of the languages.

Syllable integrity, the idea that the content of syllables may not be metrified separately, is often taken to be an inviolable constraint of grammar. This has been challenged in recent work, though the data are often subject to competing analyses. This article claims that syllable integrity is readily violable in Naasioi. Evidence from stress, the minimal word and metrically sensitive allomorphy supports an analysis of the metrical system operating on bimoraic feet, and in which long vowels can be metrified separately. Despite this, there is also evidence, in the form of vowel shortening and truncation, to indicate that long vowels constitute a single syllable. The net result is a stress system which systematically ignores syllables, a state of affairs which allows for syllable integrity violations to arise.

I introduce a discussion about the importance of coining new words for endangered languages. Coining new words is one of the many tasks that must be done to revitalize endangered languages. I propose a method for automating the process of coining new words and evaluate the method in the Quechua language. The method starts by collecting a list of English words, then translating these words into several other languages, generating a list for each language, and performing IPA notation of all lists; finally, a rule-based algorithm identifies words that match the phonotactics of the target language. The method can propose thousands of words as neologisms in the target language.

Cross-linguistically, vowel lowering/retraction are common strategies for resolving articulatory conflicts between high vowels and back consonants. Allophonic lowering of vowels /i/ and /u/ adjacent to uvulars has also been documented for several Southern Quechua dialects. For the Chanka dialect (Andahuaylas, Peru), traditional descriptions note similar allophony, but no studies have confirmed it. Unlike other Southern Quechua dialects, Chanka has only two dorsals, which contrast for both manner and place. Thus, Chanka may apply resolution processes differently, for reasons of production and/or perception.

The current investigation considers to what extent articulatory conflict resolution between high vowels and the uvular consonant occurs in Chanka. Acoustic data from a controlled experiment include 3,827 Chanka vowels from 22 speakers, balanced for sex and location of residence. Despite an overall uvular effect found, intra- and interspeaker variation shows three different allophony patterns: categorical, null, and variable. A sex-based difference in patterns is also found for rural speakers, which hints at influence from Spanish on this process in Quechua given differing Spanish proficiencies. Results seem to indicate that consonant place adaptation may exist as an additional, innovative Chanka strategy, also with three variable patterns: stable uvular, stable velar, and homorganic with vowel. This flexibility in vowel and consonant place may partially relate to Chanka’s small phoneme inventory, which allows for a broader range of realizations without creating mergers. Speakers thus alternate between vowel lowering and consonant movement as solutions: sometimes the vowel place accommodates to the fricative like in many languages, and at other times the fricative follows the vowel.

The Rongjiang variety of Kam described in the present study is a southern Dong dialect (ISO 639-3: [kmc]), which belongs to the Tai-Kadai Languages (Edmondson & Luo 2008; Pittayaporn 2021).

Phonotactic learning has been a fertile ground for research in the field of phonology. However, the challenge of lexical exceptions in phonotactic learning remains largely unexplored. Traditional learning models, which typically assume all observed input data to be grammatical, often blur the distinction between lexical exceptions and grammatical words, consequently skewing the learning results. To address this issue, this article innovates a categorical-grammar-plus-exception-filtering approach that harnesses the discrete nature of categorical grammars to filter out lexical exceptions using statistical criteria adapted from probabilistic models. Applied to naturalistic corpora from English, Polish and Turkish, the learnt grammars showed a high correlation with the acceptability judgements in behavioural experiments. Compared to benchmark models, the model performs increasingly better with data that contain a higher proportion of lexical exceptions, reaching its peak in learning Turkish non-local vowel phonotactics, highlighting its ability to handle lexical exceptions.

This research investigates the tone system of an understudied language, Du’an Zhuang and its interaction with duration. Cross-linguistically, tones tend to be less complex in shorter duration contexts. In Du’an Zhuang, syllable type provides these contexts: There are six contrastive tones among unchecked syllables with longer rhyme duration, but this is reduced to four tones in shorter duration checked syllables. Acoustic analyses of f0 and duration from six native speakers were performed to check whether tonal complexity is reduced in the shorter duration checked syllables. The results showed this was true with some exceptions. The two tones in CVVO syllables corresponded to the two least complex tones; however, one of the two CVO tones included a more complex rising tone. This rising tone exhibited a reduced f0 excursion though. Finally, there is a two-way phonological vowel length contrast in Du’an Zhuang, which necessarily interacts with syllable type via its effect on rhyme duration. However, based on our vowel duration measurements, this vowel length contrast only exists in unchecked syllables with sonorant codas, the only syllable type where rhyme duration and vowel duration could possibly differ. In this context, a sonorant coda contributes to the syllable’s rhyme duration, but not to vowel duration, allowing syllable type and vowel length to contrast independently, only in this phonological context.