The Diachronic Emergence of Post-Nasal Retroflexion in Somali Bantu Kizigua: Internal Motivation or Contact-Induced Change?

Somali Bantu Kizigua is an under-described and possibly endangered dialect of the Tanzanian language Zigula. One feature that distinguishes this dialect from Tanzanian dialects is the presence of retroflexion in pre-nasalized stops. In this paper, I will discuss how this retroflexion can be accounted for as an internally motivated sound change. The specific set of sound changes I will discuss are as follows, with some inter-speaker and intra-speaker variation in (1):\ud \ud (1) nt > nʈ > ʈ\ud (2) nd > nɖ\ud \ud The data for this study includes both diachronic and synchronic evidence. The diachronic data comes from historic sources including late 19th century and early 20th century missionary-produced publications (Kisbey 1897, 1906) that describe varieties of Zigula spoken in Tanzania during this time period. The synchronic data comes from word list recordings made of 4 speakers (3 male and 1 female) between the ages of 21 and 30.\ud \ud The analysis will be tied to recent research by Hamann & Fuchs (2010), which presents articulatory and acoustic data showing that the aerodynamic conditions required by voicing favor a more retracted articulation for voiced alveolar plosives leading to the following sound change in the languages surveyed:\ud \ud (3) d > ɖ\ud \ud I will argue that the acoustic and articulatory similarity between voiced plosives and pre-nasalized stops fits in with (3) above and discuss how Hamann & Fuchs (2010) can also account for (1), which does not occur in any of the languages discussed in their study