Re-assessing tonal diversity and geographical convergence in Mainland Southeast Asia

Abstract

Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) is often described as the quintessential Sprachbund, or language area, in which languages belonging to different language families converge as a result of contact (Alieva 1984; Enfield 2005). While we hold this to be true in a general sense, we suspect that there is little to be gained in arguing about what defines a language area or in determining the exact boundary of this language area (e.g., should it just include the mainland or insular Southeast Asia as well?). What seems much more interesting to us is to gain a better understanding of how convergence happens for specific features, especially phonological and phonetic features. In this paper, we look in detail at a specific phonological feature, tone, and at two of its phonetic correlates, pitch and voice quality. Based on a database of 197 languages and dialects (§2), we assess the extent of tonal diversity in MSEA languages (§3) and construct a statistical model of the degree to which tonal inventories can be predicted on the basis of geographic proximity, genealogical relatedness and population size (§4).