Eastern Cham as a two-tone language

Marc Brunelle

Cornell University

            Eastern Cham is an Austronesian language spoken on the south-central coast of Vietnam.  Although it has traditionally been described as having a two-register system, it has recently been analyzed as a incipiently tonal language.         

The formation of Eastern Cham registers is reminiscent of similar phenomena in other languages (Khmer, Javanese, …).  While the onset stops of Ancient Cham contrasted in voicing, the voiced and voiceless stops have merged into a single voiceless series in Modern Cham (excluding a series of voiced preglottalized stops).  However, the distinctive role of voicing was transphonologized into a register distinction, in which the low register ( < *voiced stops) is characterized by a breathy phonation and a low pitch on the vowel following the stop, while the high register ( < *voiceless stops) is realized as a modal phonation and a higher pitch. 

While it is uncontroversial that the two registers exhibit allotonic variation conditioned by final consonants (Blood, 1967; Moussay, 1971; Bùi, 1995), several scholars have recently argued that the final consonants have become unstable, possibly leading to a phonemicization  of tone.  Thus, Phú et alii (1992) claim that final –h has been lost altogether and Hoàng (1987), Phú et alii (1992) and Thurgood (1999) treat the final glottal stop as an integral part of a glottal tone.  This claim is central to the hypothesis that Eastern Cham is developing a full-fledged tonal system under the influence of Vietnamese (Hoàng, 1987; Thurgood, 1996 and 1999).

            An acoustic study of these issues carried out with Eastern Cham speakers living in Ho Chi Minh City (and therefore under intensive contact with Vietnamese) reveals that there is no evidence of a phonemicization of allotones.  Firstly, the final consonant /–h/ is systematically maintained and shows no signs of weakening.  Secondly, final glottal stops are always clearly timed with the end of the syllable and therefore behave like coda consonants, which contrasts with the Vietnamese glottal tones, where the glottalization is often realized before the end of the vowel.   Finally, our experiment shows that even if coda-conditioned allotony is present among all speakers, it varies greatly across speakers, thus preventing the emergence of a unique tone system.

            Nevertheless, the experiment shows that pitch is the main correlate of register.  Vowel duration, vowel quality and formant frequencies cannot by themselves distinguish the two registers (although they strengthen the contrast).  Further, whereas register is usually distinctive only after stops, a combination of register spreading and monosyllabicisation has led Eastern Cham to contrast a few sonorant-initial minimal pairs.  For example, /la/ ‘snake’ (< *ala) contrasts with /là/ ‘ivory, tusk’ (< *bila).  It is still unclear to what extent this kind of contrast is found in uncontrolled speech, but we can safely claim that Eastern Cham extends registral/tonal distinctions further than typical register languages.  Eastern Cham is therefore a two-tone language, but there is no evidence that the allophones of these two tones are being phonemicized under the influence of Vietnamese.     

References

Blood, David L. (1967).  Phonological Units in Cham. In Anthropological Linguistics, 9:8, pp. 15-32.

Bùi Khánh Th‰ (1996).  Ng» Pháp Ti‰ng Chæm.  Nhà xuÃt bän giáo døc. 

Hoàng, ThÎ Châu (1987).  HŒ thÓng thanh ÇiŒu ti‰ng Chàm và các kí hiŒu. In Ngôn Ng», no. 1-2, pp.31-35.

Moussay, Gérard (1971). TØ ñi‹n Chàm-ViŒt-Pháp = Dictionnaire cam-vietnamien-français Phan Rang : Trung-tâm Væn-hóa Chàm.

Phú Væn H£n, Jerold Edmondson and Kenneth Gregerson (1992), Eastern Cham as a Tone Language.  In Mon-Khmer Studies, 20, pp. 31-43.

Thurgood, Graham (1996).  Language contact and the directionality of internal ‘drift’ :  the development of tone and register in Chamic.  In Language, 71.1, pp. 1-31.

---------- (1999).  From Ancient Cham to Modern Dialects :  Two Thousand Years of Language Contact and Change.  Honolulu : U of Hawaii Press.