The impact of degree of bilingualism on the Basque sibilant Merger

Oihane Muxika-Loitzate, PhD student

Basque has an apico-alveolar /s̺/, a dental /s̪/ and a prepalatal sibilant /ʃ/ that are represented by the letters <s> as in sama ‘neck’, <z> as in zama ‘load’ and <x> as in xake ‘chess’ respectively. The apico-alveolar and the dental sibilants seem to have merged or neutralized in some areas of Biscay, Guipuzcoa, and the Basque-speaking territories of Alava (e.g. Hualde, 2010). Spanish has been hypothesized as a factor driving this merger (Jurado Noriega, 2011), however complex sibilant systems like the traditional Basque one tend to be neutralized independently of language-contact (Bukmaier et al., 2014). In order to add to this debate and shed new light on the merger, this study explores Biscayan Basque, a variety at an advanced state of the merger (Hualde, 2010). More precisely, I test how the degree of bilingualism, operationalized as language-dominance (Basque or Spanish), affects the production of the sibilants under study and the resulting neutralization by performing an acoustic analysis of the data. Furthermore, I explore the observation that stems from my fieldwork that in this variety the merger results in one single sibilant, rather than two as in other dialects. The results show that Basque and Spanish dominant speakers behave differently with regard to the sibilant merger, and that they have different places of articulation for their sibilants.

The data comes from the recordings of 10 bilingual speakers of Basque and Spanish from Amorebieta-Etxano who are between 20 and 33 years old. All the participants completed the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) Questionnaire (Birdsong et al., 2012) in order to have their language dominance measured. The BLP evaluates the following areas: (I) language history, (II) use, (III) proficiency and (IV) attitudes. The BLP provides numeric scores of dominance from -218 to +218 that allow researchers to measure dominance in a standardized way and place speakers within a continuum. According to the BLP scores in this study, four of the participants are more dominant in Basque, whereas the other four are more dominant in Spanish. The participants also completed a reading task that contained target words with the letters <s>, <z> and <x> that had been inserted in the middle of carrier sentences. A total of 1339 tokens were analyzed, and the PRAAT program (Boersma & Weenink, 2015) was used to measure the Center Of Gravity or COG. The COG correlates with the different articulatory configurations among fricatives which result in distinct places of articulation (Hualde, 2010; Styler, 2016), and the analysis of this acoustic cue allows us to determine whether the sibilants are merged or not.

All the statistical analyses were carried out using R (https://www.r-project.org). First, a four-factor ANOVA was carried out in order to analyze the effects of letter (<s>, <z> or <x>), stress (stressed or unstressed syllable), word and syllable position of the sibilant (onset initial, onset medial or coda), and language dominance (Basque or Spanish) on COG; and to evaluate whether the interactions between letter and the other variables have an effect on COG. In addition, post-hoc means comparison were carried out to explore differences among factor levels and possible interactions. The results show that <z> has the highest COG value for all the speakers in the present study (which means that it has a more fronted articulation), whereas <x> has the lowest COG value, which agrees with what Hualde (2010) describes. Only Basque dominant speakers maintain a significant distinction in the production of <z> and <x> overall, whereas Spanish dominant speakers do not make a distinction among sibilants. For Spanish dominant speakers, the resulting merged sibilant resembles the sibilant that we find in the variety of Spanish spoken in the region, which seems to support the claim that contact with Spanish is influencing the merger process that was taking place in Basque. For Basque dominant speakers, on the other hand, the resulting merged sibilant seems to be more fronted.

This is the first acoustic study that explores the effect of language dominance quantitatively on the sibilant merger. Moreover, this is the first time that the BLP is applied to a study of Basque-Spanish bilingualism and it is a novel approach to the question of how the degree of bilingualism affects the merger in Basque.