Around the world, people are shifting their language use from the minority language of their parents to the dominant language of the place they live. Through this process, minority languages are being lost. This research project will delve deep into the details of the sound system of Turoyo, an endangered Neo-Aramaic language originally spoken in southeastern Turkey, to provide a fine-grained analysis of one aspect of sound change in the language - the loss of the secondary articulation known within Semitic studies as emphasis. The project will study the language as spoken within a close-knit immigrant community in northern New Jersey. The research question is: Is emphasis being preserved within this community, and how are social factors affecting the preservation or lack thereof?
The project will consist of two parts: (1) fifty interviews directed by a sociolinguistic questionnaire to discover more about the culture's effect on the vitality of the language, and (2) an extensive acoustic study involving three generations of speakers to discover the acoustic correlates of emphasis in Turoyo, and how faithfully emphasis is being passed on between generations. The results of these two studies will be synthesized to determine what social factors correlate to the most faithful preservation of emphasis.
This research is important for three main reasons. First, this study will help in the goal to come to a clear, cross-linguistic definition of emphasis. Second, understanding the intricate details of this sound change in Turoyo will help linguists to better understand sound change in contact situations in general. Third, the community that will be studied is actively trying to pass the Turoyo language on to their children, but they do not seem to be succeeding. Why is this the case? This project will reveal the type of factors that are hindering this community from reaching their goal, and this information can then be applied to similar contact situations around the world.
