A glottalized tone in Muong (Vietic): a pilot study based on audio and electroglottographic recordings

Minh-Châu Nguyễn (1) , Lise Crevier-Buchman (2) , Alexis Michaud (1) , Didier Demolin (2)

1 LACITO - Langues et civilisations à tradition orale
2 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018

The combination of pitch and glottalization (glottal constriction or lapse into creaky voice) as relevant phonetic/phonological dimensions of lexical tone is found in several language families in Asia. The Vietic subbranch of Austroasiatic stands out in that all its languages have at least one glottalized tone. Vietnamese is a well documented example, but the others remain little studied. The research reported here contributes experimental evidence on one of these languages: Muong (Mường). Excerpts from a database of audio and electroglottographic recordings of twenty speakers allow for a characterization of this dialect's glottalized tone, as contrasted with the four other tones of this five tone system. The ultimate goal is to determine what (sub)types of glottalized tones exist in the world's languages, bringing out typological differences in terms of (i) phonetic realizations and (ii) degree of importance of glottalization as a feature of linguistic tones.

Mots clés: phonology; Muong language; phonetics; creaky voice; glottalization; tone; Linguistic fieldwork; Vietic languages

Domaines: Linguistique

Minh-Châu Nguyễn, Lise Crevier-Buchman, Alexis Michaud, Didier Demolin. A glottalized tone in Muong (Vietic): a pilot study based on audio and electroglottographic recordings. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, International Phonetic Association (IPA); Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, Aug 2019, Melbourne, Australia. ⟨hal-02088021⟩