More on the origin of uvular [R]: Phonetic and sociolinguistic motivations

Abstract

Some researchers claim that uvular [R] is the distinguishing characteristic of all Germanic languages from their Indo-European relatives (Runge 1974). Others argue that it was an innovation in French that was only adopted into German in recent history (Chambers and Trudgill 1998). I find that the uvular [R] could not have been indigenous to the original Germanic phoneme inventory for three reasons. First, Old Norse data demonstrate the coronality of the rhotic. Second, the arguments that reconstruct a back-r based on Old English data are unsound (Howell 1991). Finally, the place of articulation of the original Germanic rhotic may be deduced as a coronal sound given the cross-linguistic obscurity of a dorsal rhotic to acquire a coronal place of articulation. The highly improbable change from [R] to [r] must be reconciled for any argument that posits a dorsal rhotic in a particular Germanic daughter language. Conversely, Romance languages developed posterior rhotics as a repair strategy to deal with the markedness of [r]. Evidence fore this claim comes from the observation that, in the Romance languages that undergo uvularization, all instances of the apically trilled rhotic are replaced with the dorsal phoneme. I conclude that the reason why Germanic languages have the dorsal rhotic at all is because of prestige borrowing from French. While most dialects of Germanic languages uvularize all of the apically trilled rhotics, the dialects at the periphery of this prestige borrowing show mutations to the pattern of dorsalization. These changes are predicted by Labovs (2007) explanation of diffusion. Linguistic features which defuse into other regions are more likely to mutate because the individuals involved with the propagation of the particular feature are adults, who are imperfect language learners.