Uzbek (ISO 639-1: uz) is a Turkic language spoken mainly in Uzbekistan, where the language is accorded the ‘state language’ status (Figure 1). Outside Uzbekistan, ethnic Uzbek populations are scattered across and beyond Central Asia in such countries as Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, China, and Saudi Arabia (Balcı, 2004; Yakup, 2020:411). Many Uzbeks in the diaspora speak one or more languages in addition to Uzbek for interethnic communication (Naby, 1984:11). Some ethnic Uzbek communities are reportedly being linguistically assimilated to ethnic groups that are dominant in their countries or regions (Shalinsky, 1979:12–13; Fevzi, 2013:256; Yıldırım, 2019:64). It is therefore unclear exactly what proportion of ethnic Uzbeks retain Uzbek as their first language today. In the case of ethnic Uzbeks in Xinjiang in China, gauging the extent of linguistic assimilation can be difficult because of the limited range of contrasting features that exist between their variety of Uzbek and Uyghur, the interethnic language of Xinjiang, with which it is generally mutually intelligible (Cheng & Abudureheman, 1987:1–2). The varieties of Uzbek spoken in Afghanistan and China have developed autonomously from those spoken within the borders of the former Soviet Union, and hence differ from the present-day standard Uzbek of Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic, most notably in lexica but also in phonology, morphology, and syntax (Jarring, 1938; Abdullaev, 1979: Reichl, 1983; Cheng & Abudureheman, 1987; Hayitov et al., 1992:36; Gültekin, 2010).

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).

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.

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).

This study tests the hypothesis that alternation patterns with strong lexical support are more robust than those with no, or weak, lexical support. Focusing on three alternation patterns in Korean with varying productivity and generality, we measured lexical support in two ways. First, we conducted an acceptability-rating experiment investigating Korean speakers’ judgements on non-words with and without violations of the phonotactic constraints motivating the alternations. In addition, we performed a simulation of learning a maximum entropy (MaxEnt) Harmonic Grammar from a dictionary corpus. The results of the experiment and computational modelling confirmed the hypothesis by showing that if an alternation is robust, its associated phonotactic constraint is learned with a high weight from the MaxEnt simulation, and it affects the participants’ well-formedness ratings for non-words. Consequently, the results of this research support the claim of a tight link between alternations and phonotactics.