Emily Olsen, under the direction of Juliette Blevins of the City University of New York, will conduct a study of the sound system of Kaco', an undescribed minority language spoken in rural Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. Kaco' is an Austro-Asiatic language of the Mon Khmer family and, like other languages of this family, Kaco' is phonologically complex and unusual. Olsen's study of Kaco' will therefore advance knowledge of what types of phonological systems are possible for human languages. In addition, because sounds and sound processes provide important clues to language relatedness, Olsen's description of Kaco' sound patterns will facilitate hypotheses on the features that are unique to or characteristic of the Austroasiatic language family and will help disambiguate historical relationships between languages and speaker groups of the region.
The primary research questions involve the description of the sound patterns of the Kaco' language including contrastive vowels and consonants and their phonetic variants, the structure of Kaco' syllables; laryngeal contrasts in Kaco'syllables and their phonetic properties and phonological domains. Olsen's study will focus on documenting complex syllable structure and the role between syllables within a word. She will document phonation (vocal fold vibration) and tonogenesis (e.g., the birth of tone through consonant weakening).
In order to pursue these research questions, Olsen will collect speech samples from Kaco' speakers from several villages. Her data samples will include recordings of freeform narratives, wordlists, songs, and community folklore. The resulting corpus will be the first cultural and linguistic resource of its kind for use by Kaco' people. This resource will enable development of literacy materials for the community, including a Kaco' orthography, children's books and recordings, and a dictionary.
Data from this project will be archived at the Lund University's Repository & Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage.
