Consonantal contrasts in Hnaring Lutuv

Abstract

Hnaring is a dialect of Lutuv, a member of the South Central branch of Tibeto-Burman spoken by 15 000 to 18 000 people in Chin State in western Burma and in refugee communities worldwide (community estimates, Eberhard et al., 2022; Salaz and Raymer, 2020). Like many other Tibeto-Burman languages, Lutuv features an extensive consonantal inventory, with three-way contrasts for labial and coronal stops and two-way contrasts for dorsals, laryngeal contrasts for sibilant and lateral affricates (/ts, tsʰ/, /tl, tlʰ/), and voicing contrasts for sonorants /r, r̥, l, l̥, n, n̥, m, m̥/. Of special note is the high degree of variability observed in the instantiation of voiceless sonorants, which can include alternately ordered phases of aspiration, frication, and/or voicing. For example, voiceless laterals can be realized in at least four ways ([lʰ, ʰl, ɬ, l̥]); rhotics alternate between rhotic and sibilant productions ([ʰr, rʰ, ʃ]); and nasals show phasing and voicing differences [ʰm, mʰ, m̥, m⌢m̥]. Using both wordlist data and naturalistic speech from a conversational corpus collected during Summer 2022, this study presents a suite of temporal and spectral measures for Hnaring Lutuv consonants and combines qualitative and quantitative data to characterize the observed variation.