Phonotactic frequencies in Marathi

Abstract

Breathy sonorants are cross-linguistically rare, occurring in just 1% of the languages indexed in the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID) and 0.2% of those in the PHOIBLE database (Moran, McCloy and Wright 2014). Prior work has shed some light on their acoustic properties, but little work has investigated the language-internal distribution of these sounds in a language where they do occur, such as Marathi (Indic, spoken mainly in Maharashtra, India). With this in mind, we present an overview of the phonotactic frequencies of consonants, vowels, and CV-bigrams in the Marathi portion of the EMILLE/CIIL corpus. Results of a descriptive analysis show that breathy sonorants are underrepresented, making up fewer than 1% of the consonants in the 2.2 million-word corpus, and that they are disfavored in back vowel contexts.