LingLunch : Anne-France Pinget

Anne-France Pinget (Utrecht, OTS)
Is there tonogenesis in Dutch?

Previous studies have established that Dutch initial fricatives are involved in a sound change in progress (e.g., Kissine et al., 2003; Pinget,2020). Voiced initial labiodental fricatives /v/ are devoicing, slowly merging with their voiceless counterparts /f/. The sound change is spreading across regions and age groups. In other languages like Afrikaans where initial stops are also merging, it has been shown that the phonological contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants is still maintained by a pitch difference at the onset of the following vowel (Coetzee et al., 2014). Pitch (F0) at vowel onset typically starts lower after voiced than after voiceless consonants(e.g., Hombert et al., 1979). The process in which this difference gets phonologized is called tonogenesis.   

We investigated whether a process of tonogenesis is observable in Dutch fricatives. The maintenance of the F0 difference in the following vowel would provide evidence for incipient tonogenesis, whereas its disappearance would indicate that initial labiodental fricatives develop as a merger.

Twenty speakers were recorded in five regions of the Dutch speaking area,reading non-words with initial labiodental fricatives. Results show that pitch and fricative voicing co-vary: the F0 depression is getting lost when /v/ is produced with devoicing. F0 contours after/v/ become similar to those after /f/. We argue that these results are in line with the merger hypothesis: the F0 lowering following voiced fricatives does not become phonologized. Hence, we do notexpect this sound change in Dutch to result in a new tone system.