Browsing by Author "Luukkonen, Juha"

Nikvh is a language isolate spoken in the Russian Far East. The language is severely endangered and it is no longer transmitted to children. Estimates on the current number of speakers vary from tens to hundreds. The study examines the alternation of initial consonants in Nivkh (Consonant Mutation, CM) and the variation occurring in it. Consonant Mutation takes place between homorganic plosives and fricatives, e.g. cus pəɲx ’meat soup’ but cʰo vəɲx ’fish soup’. In addition to the phonological environment, it also requires a certain morphosyntactic context. The aim of the study was to determine the regularity of CM in the speech of the current Nivkh speakers. My own fieldwork results had led me to suppose that the modern speakers would not exhibit CM as regularly as it has been traditionally described in the literature. Developments observed in similar alternations in obsolescent Celtic languages gave support to this hypothesis. It had also been documented that in Nivkh CM, variation is abundant in post-sonorant environments. My data consisted of eight volumes of the series Sound Materials of the Nivkh Language, published between 2002 and 2013. Altogether they contained about five and a half hours of conversations in Nivkh and their transcriptions. From these, more than 2 300 contexts of CM were retrieved and saved to a database for further analysis. The realization of CM was compared between speakers, in different syntactic structures, and for different alternating sounds. The study confirms the weak predictability of post-sonorant CM. In other cases, less than 7 % of forms were at odds with the traditional rules, and even some of these could be attributed to explaining factors such as lexical exceptions. Some anomalies were left unexplained, but their frequency was low enough to conclude that the natural variation occurring in a small language without a prestige norm is a more probable explanation than language attrition, even though the latter may contribute to the variation in case of the youngest speakers.