Obstruent consonants often exert a localized influence on pitch level in following segments, such that pitch is higher following phonologically voiceless obstruents. The underlying mechanisms of such co-intrinsic pitch effects remain disputed, and it remains unclear how they interact with other demands on the larynx. We revisit co-intrinsic pitch effects in Danish, a language with two series of voiceless stops that differ in the magnitude and extent of glottal spreading, and accordingly, in the duration of positive voice onset time. Danish is further interesting because it has a phonological voice quality contrast (stød) which places complex demands on the larynx, and there is regional variation in where intonational pitch peaks occur relative to stressed syllables. We elicit alternative question sentences from speakers of two dialects of Danish, which allows us to tease apart how co-intrinsic pitch effects behave when there are multiple series of voiceless stops, when the global pitch target is high versus low, and when there are competing demands on the larynx from a voice quality contrast or a local pitch target. We find that pitch is uniformly raised in both series of stops relative to a neutral baseline, but the duration and magnitude of the effect differs by stop category, suggesting co-intrinsic pitch effects that are scalar rather than categorical. This effect is modulated in complicated ways by other prosodic sources of high pitch, which may be either synergistic or antagonistic to co-intrinsic pitch depending on their phonological source.

Wenchang (文昌市) is situated in the northeast part of Hainan province (海南省), China. The city has a total population of about 570,000 local people.1 The dialect (文昌话) spoken here is representative of Hainan Min dialect group of Chinese (ISO 639-3; code:nan).

Mappila Malayalam (MM) is a sociolect of Malayalam, a language belonging to the Dravidian family, that is primarily spoken by the Muslim community in the northern region of Kerala. It developed alongside other varieties of Malayalam and is unique in that, unlike other non-standard varieties, it has a fully developed script popularly known as ‘Arabi-Malayalam’ (a variant form of the Arabic script with special orthographic features to accommodate Malayalam phonemes) and has its own oral and written literature (Shamsuddeen 1978). The use of the script is now mostly limited to madrasas, and the spoken variety of MM continues to thrive in its contemporary form (Cheerangote 2013; Ashraf 2021). The spoken variety is interesting for sociolinguistic reasons, as it is primarily associated with the Muslim community in the district of Malappuram, a marginalised and socioeconomically disadvantaged community which represents a paradox for a state otherwise known for its high social indices. Although this variety can be further classified into different subgroups based on their geographical/district boundaries, such as the Malappuram dialect, Kozhikode dialect, and Kannur dialect, it is mostly associated with Malappuram (Figure 1) due to that district’s high Muslim population compared to the others in Kerala. According to the census report (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India 2011), Malappuram has over 4 million inhabitants, the highest in the state, and 70.24% of them are Muslims. Hence, for this Illustration, the data is collected from the Malappuram district.

Standard Scottish English (SSE) traditionally lacks the pandialectal English contrast between paired tense and lax vowels in three instances, resulting in homophones like (1) palm-Pam, (2) caught-cot and (3) pool-pull, from the lexical sets palm/bath/trap, thought/lot and goose/foot, respectively. Individual speakers may differentiate between paired vowels, and it has been proposed that (2) above implies (1), and (3) implies both (2) and (1). However, this implicational hierarchy has neither been motivated nor investigated empirically. This article inspects the first two formants of vowels produced by n = 34 speakers from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Scotland). While the nature of the modest pairwise differentiation that occurs in the data agrees with the notion of an incipient split along Southern British lines, there is no evidence of an implicational hierarchy. Furthermore, the two basic predictors age and gender are of limited explanatory value.