Abstract
The use of a pulmonic ingressive airstream mechanism in the pronunciation of certain discourse particles, typically variants of “yes” and “no,” is a well-known and salient feature of Scandinavian languages. It has been suggested, however, that this may be a more general North Atlantic phenomenon—occurring as far west as Newfoundland and New England—which spread via migration and trade routes. Unfortunately, there seem to be very few audio recordings available from areas other than Scandinavia and Newfoundland (perhaps partly attributable to various elicitation difficulties) and very little acoustic analysis has been presented [E. Thom, MA thesis, UCL (2005); R. Eklund, J. Int. Phonetic Assoc. 38, 235–325 (2008)]. This paper contains a study of ingressive discourse particles in the Shetland Islands, which have strong historical links to Scandinavia. A significant number of ingressives were found in field recordings from 1980–1982. This paper presents an acoustic pilot study of ingressive discourse particles, focusing on issues such as formant structure and voicing/phonation characteristics. A comparison is also made with previous analyses [E. Thom, MA thesis, UCL (2005); R. Eklund, J. Int. Phonetic Assoc. 38, 235–325 (2008)] as well as audio samples from other localities within the North Atlantic region.
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