Losing ground?: Towards a description of palatal lateral variation in Breton

Abstract

Traditional Breton descriptions and grammars attest that [j] is an often-pronounced variant of /ʎ/ (Hemon, 1995), however, little is known about what factors influence this phoneme’s realization. This study aims to elucidate what linguistic and social factors affect Breton /ʎ/ pronunciations. Given that Breton new speakers are often militant in promoting Breton revitalization (Jones, 1995) and their pronunciations, unlike those of traditional speakers, are strongly influenced by French (Hornsby, 2015), we predicted new speakers will produce [j] more than traditional speakers. We elicited 125 tokens that contain /ʎ/ from eight Breton-speaking participants in a wordlist task—the only categorical [j]-producer was the sole traditional Breton speaker to participate. Focusing on new speakers, we use mixed-effects regression and find older speakers produce [ʎ] more often than younger speakers (p < 0.0001), and gender is not a significant predictor. For linguistic factors, word position does not play a significant role, but [j] is more frequent in intervocalic tokens when the following vowel is palatal (p = 0.0249). Although /ʎ/ variation does not exhibit effects of prestige, our results suggest a potential change in progress whereby [ʎ] is being lost in favor of [j] and is particularly gaining momentum intervocalically when the following vowel is palatal.