Throughout history, languages have frequently come into sustained contact with each other as a result of socio-political changes, migration and demographic shift, often creating multilingual societies. While the effects of contact have been studied for a range of linguistic features, much less is known about its effects on prosody, even though prosody may be particularly susceptible to contact influence, given that it is rarely represented in writing and arguably passes more easily under the radar of prescriptivism.
In this project, we investigate how geographical and temporal factors influence the sharing of prosody across typologically diverse languages spoken within a specific area, namely Cyprus. Analysing audio recordings of Cypriot varieties of Greek, Turkish and Arabic, we test the hypothesis that prolonged, close contact leads to some degree of prosodic convergence. We ask: being an island, and therefore topographically limited, does Cyprus represent a kind of linguistic ‘melting pot’, with its own distinct prosodic signature? We compare patterns with non-Cypriot varieties of these languages, i.e. varieties that are phylogenetically close but geographically distant, as a benchmark.
Funded by a University of Oxford John Fell Fund grant: 0011309 (PI Elinor Payne)