This talk was given on 12/11/2021 as part of the ELAR/ZAS lecture series "Language: Documentation and Theory".
Abstract:
I will start this talk with an overview of the Ahamb Language Documentation Project – an ELDP-funded project for the documentation and description of the previously undcoumented Ahamb language, spoken on Malekula Island in Vanuatu (Rangelov 2020).
One of the most typologically interesting features of Ahamb is the presence of two phonemic bilabial trills, which are cross-linguistically very rare sounds despite their being relatively easy to articulate in isolation. While the prenasalized bilabial trill ᵐʙ is found in a number of other languages of Malekula, Ahamb was the first Austronesian language in which a phonemic plain unvoiced bilabial trill ʙ̥ was documented.
Firstly, I will address the challenges in documenting phonetic features in a remote field setting. In the case of Ahamb’s bilabial trills, it was possible to make recordings using a simple but innovative technique for analyzing nasality (Stewart & Kohlberger 2017) as well as slow motion video recordings, in order to determine more precisely the articulatory properties of Ahamb’s bilabial trills (Rangelov 2019).
Secondly, I will present a historical analysis of bilabial trills in Ahamb and other Malekula languages, to determine the phonological environments that triggered the development of bilabial trills. The results are partially in line with previous theories of the emergence of bilabial trills (Maddieson 1989; Lynch 2016) but the articulatory properties of ʙ̥ in particular present further challenges.
Thirdly, considering the results of the phonetic and historical analyses, I will try to answer the question why these rare sounds emerged and persisted in exactly these few languages and not in others. I will propose a scenario in which the emergence and persistence of bilabial trills in Ahamb and other Malekula languages was driven by a number of forces which are both language-internal and external, and can be classified as either phonetic, structural, or social (Rangelov et al. 2021).