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Sibilant mergers in 18th-century Basque: A quantitative study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Dorota Krajewska ,
Eneko Zuloaga  and
Ander Egurtzegi
Dorota Krajewska*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Unibertsitateko Ibilbidea, 5, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Eneko Zuloaga*
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies, University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Unibertsitateko Ibilbidea, 5, 01006 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Ander Egurtzegi*
Affiliation:
CNRS IKER (UMR5478), Campus de la Nive, Château-Neuf, 15, Place Paul Bert, 64100 Bayonne, France
*
dorota.krajewska@ehu.eus
eneko.zuloaga@ehu.eus
ander.egurtzegi@iker.cnrs.fr
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Abstract

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Conservative Basque dialects distinguish apical and laminai alveolar sibilants in the fricative and affricate series. This paper analyses the changes this system was undergoing in the Central Basque variety of San Sebastián in the 18th century: (1) the “Western merger”: neutralisation of the laminal and apical fricative sibilants in favour of the latter and the neutralisation of the laminai and apical alveolar affricates in favour of the fonner, which started in Western Basque and spread to some Central varieties, and (2) the “Central merger”, a more recent development, limited to some central dialects, where both fricative and affricate alveolar sibilants are realised as laminais. A generalised linear mixed-effects model was fitted to the data extracted from an early-18th-century manuscript which shows evidence of both mergers. We propose that sibilant mergers were still in progress in the variety and time period under study and that they are interrelated processes. The Western merger started as a phonetically-conditioned sound change due to coarticulation to a following consonant. As this neutralisation extended to other positions, a hypercorrective change was initiated in some Central varieties, which eventually resulted in a mirror-image process, namely a change from apical to laminal fricatives.

Keywords

sibilantsBasquemergercorpus study

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonological Data and Analysis , Volume 4 , Issue 5 , 2022 , pp. 1 - 31
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
Published by the Linguistic Society of America with permission of the authors under a CC BY 3.0 license.
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Dorota Krajewska et al.

Footnotes

*

The research reported in this paper was funded by the following projects: “Monumenta Linguae Vasconum VI” (PID2020-118445GB-I00), “Modem approaches to diachronic phonology applied to Basque (MADPAB)” (ANR-20-CE27-0007) and “Diachronic Linguistics, Typology and the History of Basque” (IT1534-22). Data and code used in this paper as well as supplementary materials are available at https://osf.io/t6a7w/.

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