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Keren Rice

Language contact, phonemic inventories, and the Athapaskan language family

Keywords: areal linguistics, Athapaskan, bilingualism, borrowing, phoneme inventories, language contact

Languages of the Athapaskan family were often in contact with languages of other families, and speakers were often bilingual (or multilingual). The languages typically have large consonant inventories, and speakers were often bilingual in languages with smaller or larger inventories. These languages present a good laboratory of study for the predictions made by Peter Trudgill concerning sociolinguistic factors governing inventory size. There is relative stability in the size of the stem-initial consonant inventory across the language family independent of the type of contact situation found and the size of the consonant inventories of the languages in contact.

Linguistic Typology, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 1430-0532
Volume: 8, 10/2004
Pages: 321 - 343

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