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Abstract This paper reports on a case study of differences in contextual tonal processes between a mother (native speaker) and adult son (heritage speaker) who speak the Ngok dialect of Dinka. Dinka (Nilotic, South Sudan) is known for its highly complex suprasegmental system. Tone has a high functional load in the language, and one of the primary ways in which varieties of Dinka are differentiated is via the tone systems. I show that lexical tone appears to be less robust for the son, and that when prompted to speak before his parent, the son exhibits less tone sandhi relative to when the parent speaks first. This has implications for underlying specification and subsequent formal analyses and suggests that lexical specification and contextual tonal processes may be processed on different levels. However, inconsistencies in the son’s speech suggest that the overall picture may be more complex than initially anticipated. 

Abstract This paper illustrates that in-depth descriptive work of closely related varieties of Dinka, a Nilotic tone language with an unusually complex suprasegmental system, provides solutions to previously unanswered questions about historical tone change. Using data from six dialects, I show the directions and mechanisms of tone splits and mergers. In-depth descriptive work combined with comparison allows innovation and novel discoveries from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. These are also powerful tools for historical tonology and may ultimately shed light on the origins of tonal phenomena with previously opaque historical perspectives. 

Abstract Verbs in Dinka (West Nilotic, Nilo-Saharan) are largely monosyllabic, but nonetheless the language displays a rich inventory of inflectional and derivational forms realized through alternations of the stem vowel with a morphomic distribution. The inflectional paradigm is driven by two complementary alternations which Andersen (1993, 2017) characterizes in phonological terms:fronting, which changes a stem vowel /a/ to /ɛ/, andlowering, which lowers or diphthongizes all other stem vowels. Both look like they might have been produced by the assimilatory effects of suffixes which have now been lost. While this is undoubtedly the case withlowering(Andersen, 1990), we argue thatfrontingwas due to morphological analogy,pacevan Urk and Chong (2022). Strikingly, the result was a vowel alternation pattern otherwise unattested in the verbal system, and whose resemblance to a phonologically conditioned change is purely coincidental. Our proposed reconstruction reveals two noteworthy and typologically unusual properties of this analogical change: (i) it operated on the overall system of morphophonological alternations, not on individual paradigms, and (ii) its output was determined by the phonological ambiguity of the analogical model, which we take to be a novel route towards the emergence of morphomes. 

{"Abstract":["This dataset accompanies the paper "Heritage Tone and the Effects of the Obligatory Contour Principle," published in <i> Heritage Language Journal. <i>"]} 

Languages with independently contrastive Voice Quality and Tone are rare, and the evidence base on them is limited. As a result, key hypotheses on how their phonetic realizations interact with one another and with the vowel system remain tentative. Against the background of this evidence base, it is worthwhile to conduct a production study in which Voice Quality, Tone, and Vowel Quality are orthogonally crossed. This paper presents the results of a comprehensive acoustic study on this configuration in Dinka (Nilo-Saharan, South Sudan). The study is based on 29 four-member minimal sets for Voice Quality (Modal vs. Breathy) and Tone (Low vs. High), across all seven of the Dinka vowels (/i, e, ɛ, a, ɔ, o, u/). These materials were elicited from eight speakers of the Bor South variety of Dinka. The results indicate that Voice Quality, Tone, and Vowel Quality each have their own primary correlate: phonation, F0, and formants, respectively. In addition, each distinction influences other phonetic parameters to a lesser extent. Importantly, the Voice Quality contrast is realized saliently on vowels in Low- and-High-toned syllables alike, and across the vocalic domain.