Intonation of Greek–Turkish contact: a real-time diachronic study

Conference item

In multilingual communities, contact varieties are characterized by a combination of linguistic features from the source languages. Speakers of Asia Minor Greek (AMG) cohabited with Turkish speakers for 800 years until the 1923 Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations which forced a two-way mass migration between Turkey and Greece. This severed AMG speakers’ everyday contact with Turkish. Many second- and third-generation heritage speakers of AMG now live in villages in Greece. In this diachronic study we examine the intonation of the continuation rise tune in the speech of two generations of AMG speakers: first-generation speakers born in the Anatolian peninsula and second-generation speakers born and raised in Greece. We examine whether contact effects in intonation persist after contact has ceased, through comparison of the f₀ patterns in the speech of the two AMG generations with those of Athenian Greek and Turkish speakers. Our findings show two patterns in the f₀ curve shape and pitch alignment of the continuation rises, one similar to the Athenian and one similar to the Turkish, indicating code-mixing. In addition, our results reveal that this dual patterning diminishes in the speech of second-generation AMG speakers, indicating intergenerational change towards a more Athenian-like pattern.

Authors: Baltazani, M; Przedlacka, J; Coleman, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: International Speech Communication Association
• Host title: Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2020
• Pages: 730-734
• Publication date: 2020-05-25
• Acceptance date: 2020-02-29
• Event title: Speech Prosody 2020: the 10th International Conference on Speech Prosody
• Event location: Tokyo, Japan
• Event website: https://sp2020.jpn.org/
• Event start date: 2020-05-25
• Event end date: 2020-05-28
• DOI: 10.21437/speechprosody.2020-149
• ISSN: 2333-2042
• Language: English
• Keywords: real-time diachronic data; historical development; curve fitting; continuation rise tune; intonation; intergenerational change