LANGUAGE IN INDIA

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Volume 17:6 June 2017
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
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Phonological Processes in Barak Valley Meitei

Barnali Oinam
Jawaharlal Nehru University

Abstract

The paper presents select phonological processes found to occur in Barak Valley Meitei (hence forth BVM) using a descriptive framework. The idiosyncratic phonological feature of BVM is the substitution of /?/ in the place of /j/ in word initial position. This is not found to occur in other positions except as allophones after /?/ prefixation. Phonological processes occurring in the language such as Lenition, Apocope, Elision, and Vowel harmony lend the language a more distinct quality and the paper attempts to account for these phenomena.

Barak Valley Meitei is a geographical dialect of Meitei spoken in the Cachar District of Assam. This population of Meitei speakers (1,40,500 as per the report of the Manipuri Development Council, 2011) was placed in the state of Assam from Manipur by an exodus triggered more than 200 years ago due to the Burmese Invasion of Manipur (1819-1825). Most speakers are multilingual as they interact on a daily basis with speakers of Bengali (Indo-Aryan) and other ethnic communities that co-exist in the same area like Hmar, Rongmei and Mizo which are Tibeto-Burman. English, Bengali and Hindi is a part of the educational curriculum and speakers are acquainted with the use of these as well as other neighbouring languages. There is a variation in the language due to religious and cultural background and this study is based on the Hindu section of the BVM community.

Keywords:

1. Lenition:

Lenition traditionally refers to the ‘weakening’ of a sound segment. Lenition is a term used in phonology to refer to a weakening in the overall strength of a sound, whether diachronically or synchronically; opposed to fortition. Typically, lenition involves the change from a stop to a fricative, a fricative to an approximant, a voiceless sound to a voiced sound, or a sound being reduced (lenite) to zero. For example, the initial mutation in Celtic languages shows lenition in such cases as Welsh pen ‘head’ becoming ben ‘(his) head’ (Crystal 2008: 274). Lenition can involve such changes as making a consonant more sonorous (vowel-like), causing a consonant to lose its place of articulation which turns a consonant into a glottal consonant like /h/ or /?/ or even causing a consonant to disappear entirely. Often the term is extended to various other processes, such as loss of aspiration, shortening of long segments and monophthongization of diphthongs, which represent ‘weakening’ in some intuitive sense (Trask, 1996: 201).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Barnali Oinam
Centre for Linguistics
School of Languages and Literature
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi 110067
India
barnie.oinam@mail.com

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