Contact effects on voice-onset time in Patagonian Welsh

Abstract

The effects of language contact extend well beyond lexical borrowings and can include morphosyntactic, phonetic, and phonological changes over time (Thomason & Kaufman 1998). One especially common outcome of long-term contact is phonetic transfer (Matras 2009:222). The Welsh spoken in Patagonia, in close contact with Spanish for the past 150 years, offers one potential example: Jones (1984) observes that younger Patagonian Welsh speakers may be developing unaspirated voiceless stops /p t k/ as a result of Spanish contact. This paper explores this hypothesis through a quantitative study of voice-onset time (VOT) of the Welsh voiceless stops /p t k/ in contemporary conversational speech data from Patagonia and Wales, from male and female speakers in three age groups (0-29, 30-59, and 60 + ). Results show that the tendencies reported by Jones (1984) have held true, and in fact have generalized to become a feature of Patagonian Welsh for speakers of all ages: Patagonian speakers produce the Welsh stops /p t k/ with significantly shorter VOT values than speakers from Wales. These results shed light on an important distinguishing phonetic feature of this understudied variety of Welsh, as well as the dynamics of language contact in action.