09 Mar 2004

Bert Remijsen

Matbat is an endangered Austronesian language, spoken on Misol Island (Indonesia). There are two interesting phenomena in the phonological system. One is its lexical tone system, with six lexically contrastive tonemes. Another is the vowel system, which has developed a seven-vowel system from the five-vowel system of its protolanguage. In this paper, I present phonological and phonetic data on the Matbat tones and vowels. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between vowels and tones. It is well-known that vowels have an intrinsic influence on fundamental frequency (f0), with high vowels having higher f0 than low vowels in the same context. The tonal conditioning of the Matbat vowel system suggests that, the way around, f0 can also affect vowel quality.

[back to PWorkshop Archives]

<owner-pworkshop@ling.ed.ac.uk>