An investigation of vowel anteriority in three Turkic languages using ultrasound tongue imaging

Abstract

This study uses ultrasound imaging of the tongue to examine the articulatory correlates of the anterior / posterior vowel contrast in three Turkic languages: Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. It has long been understood that languages distinguish anterior and posterior vowels during articulation by the front-back position of the tongue body. In the 1960s, it was found that a second anteriority distinction was used in a number of languages of Africa—namely, that of tongue root position. In these languages, any given vowel is both tongue-body front or back and tongue-root advanced or retracted. In the 1980s, sources began to demonstrate the existence of a tongue-root contrast in the vowel systems of Central Eurasian languages. Various Tungusic and Mongolic languages were shown to exhibit vowel inventories and accompanying phonetic and phonological patterns very similar to those found in the tongue-root systems of African languages. Vajda (1994), based on very limited articulatory and acoustic data for Kazakh, came to the conclusion that the single anteriority contrast in Kazakh’s vowel system was one of tongue root position and not tongue body position. This is the only known claim of a tongue-root-only vowel anteriority system and the only claim for a tongue-root contrast in a Turkic language. The present study, then, investigates the articulatory correlates of the vowel anteriority system of Kazakh, using ultrasound tongue imaging. In addition, two other Turkic languages are examined: Kyrgyz, a close relative of Kazakh with a notably different vowel system, and Turkish, a more distant relative of the two which has received considerably more attention in the Linguistics literature. Turkish is found to contrast anterior and posterior vowels using just the tongue body, while Kazakh and Kyrgyz do so using the positions of the tongue body and the tongue root combined. In other words, Kazakh and Kyrgyz exhibit an anteriority system where tongue body position and tongue root position are correlated—a pattern not previously identified in the literature.