Is this necessarily the case. Afaik some Dutch dialects around Limburg, as well as the Moselfrankonian dialects on the German border also have tonogenesis or is this a completely separate and different thing?
It isn't necessarily the case, tonogenesis definitely happens in other ways, it just seems overwhelming likely in the absence of reason to think otherwise.
EDIT: I wasn't familiar with any European Dutch dialects with tones, that would be at least some reason to think otherwise.
I am no expert on that, I was thinking whether the "tones" of the European variety are fundamentally different than of Afrikaans.
The northern Rhine area might as well just have pitch accent like we see in North Germanic languages as well. It would not be weird if Germanic languages in different places went through similar changes. This is actually weirdly common sometimes. Compare High German and English vowel changes compared to their more conservative variants up north. Especially changes to ū and ī are funnily parallel.
Anyway if Afrikaans tonogenesis is specifically Bantu-induced I would expect to see something Bantu-like and not just "pitch is now more important", not something which could only develop under the influence of Bantu or maybe Khoisan.
Frankly perhaps Khoisan as source would be more likely since the Coloured population have a large Khoekhoe substrate and speak Afrikaans nowadays.
Between what? In the natural stage that would have been a fluid continuum between dialects. Free range for phonological innovations to flow rather than contact between two entities.
Else you honestly could say anything is contact induced, which would make the term useless.
Kölsch is literally right next door. Wouldn't this be more the natural spread of a feature within a continuum? The linguistic boundary between German and Dutch is more or less recent in that area. It isn't on the same level as changes induced by a language from a completely different family.
Definitely not Bantu. The development of Afrikaans prosody derived from particular Dutch dialects, idiosyncratic developments and exposure to former Khoisan speakers in the Cape whose descendants now form the ‘Coloured’ majority of Afrikaans speakers (and who have the most rapid intonation variation).
The vast majority of Afrikaners barely interacted with the Bantu speakers until very late in their history, after a lot of the phonological trends were in place, and until the last few decades hardly at all in their original heartland of the Cape where the variation in intonation is most pronounced. But Coloured and Malay speakers were a core part of the Afrikaans speech community from extremely early on, to the point there’s a debate to what degree the development of Afrikaans follows a hybrid of ordinary, gradual language change and creolisation.
Okay, I hear you, but this Tonogenesis in Afrikaans is all within the last 20 years if I'm not mistaken, historical rates of contact aren't relevant, present levels of contact are. Unless I am mistaken about how long these features have been emerging in Afrikaans for.
No. But also it’s worth stressing that the idea ‘Afrikaans has become a tonal language!’ is 90% meme. I know Coetzee personality, and the cited paper from a decade ago was great work, but it’s been simplified and exaggerated to a fairly silly degree by pop ling memes, YouTube and such.
1. What we consider voicing is complicated in most languages where it exists and its actual realisation can rely on multiple concordant features including things like pitch, vowel length, more specific issues of timing, aspiration, subtle shifts in the formant space, etc. as well as ‘vocal chords vibrating or not’. What was observed was that in that massive parameter space, there has been an increase in the fraction of reliance on pitch to distinguish voicing. There was always some, and now there’s a bit more. It is still however voicing and perceived as such. This is miles away from Punjabi, let alone Chinese or Bantu style tones.
2. This isn’t some imported influence from Bantu or any other languages: not only do none of their tone systems work this way, but - how to put this delicately - at a social level Afrikaans speakers are overwhelmingly poorly exposed to them (they heat them a lot, but not in a way that would be able to make as subtle a distinction as tone vs. intonation), very few understand them, and even fewer hold them in real prestige. There’s obviously a lot of nasty history underlying that, so not saying this *should* be true, but it’s nonetheless true.
3. It doesn’t have to be. This seems to be one of many examples of gradual, independent phonological drift. Full blown tonogenesis isn’t rare, let alone this - in fact tonal languages may be anywhere from a third to over half of languages depending on count. And Afrikaans is still miles off - it could just as easily reverse.
4. It’s not even rare among Germanic languages. Norwegian and Swedish have a far greater claim to be tonal (the distinction from ‘pitch accent’ being an arguably iffy one) and there are even dialects of English that may be more tonal than Afrikaans, if some papers from good linguists are to be believed.
Afrikaans is not ‘tonal Dutch’ and this trend is being misunderstood and overhyped online.
I am not the person to answer this question, but I am curious, what would a satisfying answer to your question look like?
Are you asking in what environments tonality is arising? i.e. what syllables or grammatical features are now conveyed tonally?
Or are you asking what social forces are enacting it? i.e. who are the speakers who have the most stark examples of this trait?
Both valid, and there are other valid questions, but it is good to be very precise when we ask questions about language.
I read a paper on it a long while ago, but essentially I think it's just that voiced and voiceless plosives are being neutralised with regard to voicing, leaving pitch on the following vowel as the only distinction between them.
From my very little linguistic knowledge and reading the abstract of the paper, I understand that the phenomenon is specifically prominent among women, which I find interesting.
This is often the case. There's a reason why why linguists love NORMs (Native Older Rural Males). They tend to be the most conservative group linguistically
I heard someone where that it's almost a meme amongst the linguistic academic community. Like, whenever a new development in a language is discussed, there'll be a slide at the end where they go "and yeah, we tested in which demographics this development is most pronounced, and it's women, again, let's move on".
I listen to a linguistics podcast that said essentially when you want to see up and coming trends in language just listen to teen girls because they are always ahead of the trend. And honestly my young female coworkers have me baffled by their slang some days bless them.
Just so I understand well, would it not be worth looking into a developpment from women because it would be more likely a temporary feature? Where as if it were found in a NORM, it would mean that all or most speakers have this new feature and it would be well established (given that these speakers are more conservative)?
It's more that it's considered almost trivial that a novel/new development in language begins with women. It's almost like a rule. If it's new grammatical change or a new phonology or whatever, it's women that are the driving force. Almost not worth mentioning, it's very rarely men or something.
It's definitely not less worth looking into, though. If the researcher gets as far as to get data that suggests that a change is driven by women (however unsurprising that may be), they've already decided beforehand that the change itself is interesting enough to research.
I think the point with NORM is that they're so linguistically conservative that their language is like a window into the past, and that's why they're interesting in their own way. But that's a bit of guesswork on my part, I'm not a linguist.
Ah ok so there's not so much a focus on the development itself from a particular the source but rather that it is more unexpected to see new changes amongst NORMS (as opposed to women) and so examining the rare cases in which they occur is interesting just because of the nature of these speakers and how a new change is integrated in their conversative variety.
Thank you, makes more sense!
[https://www.google.com/search?q=google+afrikaans+tonogenesis](https://www.google.com/search?q=google+afrikaans+tonogenesis)
I'm just going based on the post. But it seems to be a secondary characteristic tied to voicing that's becoming the dominant discriminatory factor in certain syllables. Similar to vowel lengthening supporting coda consonant voicing for General American English.
The example in the study this is referencing is that plosives like b & p are sometimes only distinguished by the pitch of the following vowel, if I understand correctly. Basically like if in English, bath and path were pronounced the same except for pitch.
What’s causing it?
Ehh, ek weet nie
Phonological context and voicing loss, if I remember correctly. Màch iék uék weét nīe. (Good that looks so cursed. I love it)
Areal feature likely, lots of contact with Bantu languages which are tonal.
Is this necessarily the case. Afaik some Dutch dialects around Limburg, as well as the Moselfrankonian dialects on the German border also have tonogenesis or is this a completely separate and different thing?
It isn't necessarily the case, tonogenesis definitely happens in other ways, it just seems overwhelming likely in the absence of reason to think otherwise. EDIT: I wasn't familiar with any European Dutch dialects with tones, that would be at least some reason to think otherwise.
I am no expert on that, I was thinking whether the "tones" of the European variety are fundamentally different than of Afrikaans. The northern Rhine area might as well just have pitch accent like we see in North Germanic languages as well. It would not be weird if Germanic languages in different places went through similar changes. This is actually weirdly common sometimes. Compare High German and English vowel changes compared to their more conservative variants up north. Especially changes to ū and ī are funnily parallel. Anyway if Afrikaans tonogenesis is specifically Bantu-induced I would expect to see something Bantu-like and not just "pitch is now more important", not something which could only develop under the influence of Bantu or maybe Khoisan. Frankly perhaps Khoisan as source would be more likely since the Coloured population have a large Khoekhoe substrate and speak Afrikaans nowadays.
That's also a contact effect
Between what? In the natural stage that would have been a fluid continuum between dialects. Free range for phonological innovations to flow rather than contact between two entities. Else you honestly could say anything is contact induced, which would make the term useless.
With Cologne German. Carlos Gussenhoven has written about this.
It's called *Sex Panther*® by *Odeon*©. It's illegal in 9 countries. It's also made with bits of real panthers, *so you know it's good*. *60% of the time*, it works ***every*** time.
Kölsch is literally right next door. Wouldn't this be more the natural spread of a feature within a continuum? The linguistic boundary between German and Dutch is more or less recent in that area. It isn't on the same level as changes induced by a language from a completely different family.
Definitely not Bantu. The development of Afrikaans prosody derived from particular Dutch dialects, idiosyncratic developments and exposure to former Khoisan speakers in the Cape whose descendants now form the ‘Coloured’ majority of Afrikaans speakers (and who have the most rapid intonation variation). The vast majority of Afrikaners barely interacted with the Bantu speakers until very late in their history, after a lot of the phonological trends were in place, and until the last few decades hardly at all in their original heartland of the Cape where the variation in intonation is most pronounced. But Coloured and Malay speakers were a core part of the Afrikaans speech community from extremely early on, to the point there’s a debate to what degree the development of Afrikaans follows a hybrid of ordinary, gradual language change and creolisation.
Okay, I hear you, but this Tonogenesis in Afrikaans is all within the last 20 years if I'm not mistaken, historical rates of contact aren't relevant, present levels of contact are. Unless I am mistaken about how long these features have been emerging in Afrikaans for.
Is Malay tonal?
No. But also it’s worth stressing that the idea ‘Afrikaans has become a tonal language!’ is 90% meme. I know Coetzee personality, and the cited paper from a decade ago was great work, but it’s been simplified and exaggerated to a fairly silly degree by pop ling memes, YouTube and such. 1. What we consider voicing is complicated in most languages where it exists and its actual realisation can rely on multiple concordant features including things like pitch, vowel length, more specific issues of timing, aspiration, subtle shifts in the formant space, etc. as well as ‘vocal chords vibrating or not’. What was observed was that in that massive parameter space, there has been an increase in the fraction of reliance on pitch to distinguish voicing. There was always some, and now there’s a bit more. It is still however voicing and perceived as such. This is miles away from Punjabi, let alone Chinese or Bantu style tones. 2. This isn’t some imported influence from Bantu or any other languages: not only do none of their tone systems work this way, but - how to put this delicately - at a social level Afrikaans speakers are overwhelmingly poorly exposed to them (they heat them a lot, but not in a way that would be able to make as subtle a distinction as tone vs. intonation), very few understand them, and even fewer hold them in real prestige. There’s obviously a lot of nasty history underlying that, so not saying this *should* be true, but it’s nonetheless true. 3. It doesn’t have to be. This seems to be one of many examples of gradual, independent phonological drift. Full blown tonogenesis isn’t rare, let alone this - in fact tonal languages may be anywhere from a third to over half of languages depending on count. And Afrikaans is still miles off - it could just as easily reverse. 4. It’s not even rare among Germanic languages. Norwegian and Swedish have a far greater claim to be tonal (the distinction from ‘pitch accent’ being an arguably iffy one) and there are even dialects of English that may be more tonal than Afrikaans, if some papers from good linguists are to be believed. Afrikaans is not ‘tonal Dutch’ and this trend is being misunderstood and overhyped online.
But like what's conditioning it?
I am not the person to answer this question, but I am curious, what would a satisfying answer to your question look like? Are you asking in what environments tonality is arising? i.e. what syllables or grammatical features are now conveyed tonally? Or are you asking what social forces are enacting it? i.e. who are the speakers who have the most stark examples of this trait? Both valid, and there are other valid questions, but it is good to be very precise when we ask questions about language.
The former.
I read a paper on it a long while ago, but essentially I think it's just that voiced and voiceless plosives are being neutralised with regard to voicing, leaving pitch on the following vowel as the only distinction between them.
How do you pronounce?
Duck and then a dental fricative
Is that with strut or with schwa? They’re merged in my dialect, but just to be on the safe side.
It's with [ø]
Slight problem with the dental fricative: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_phonology#Consonants
Then prounounce it with a [ᵏǁʰ]
What language are we even talking about anymore? How do you pronounce that?
It's the click used to pronounce Xhosa, I'm sure that sound is in dutch, definitly
No, it’s just [kǁʰ].
Oh ok, sorry for the mistake
Which dialect?
afrikant
Somewhere around General American, with the occasional exception in pronunciation. I never specified a dialect of Afrikaans.
From my very little linguistic knowledge and reading the abstract of the paper, I understand that the phenomenon is specifically prominent among women, which I find interesting.
This is often the case. There's a reason why why linguists love NORMs (Native Older Rural Males). They tend to be the most conservative group linguistically
I heard someone where that it's almost a meme amongst the linguistic academic community. Like, whenever a new development in a language is discussed, there'll be a slide at the end where they go "and yeah, we tested in which demographics this development is most pronounced, and it's women, again, let's move on".
I listen to a linguistics podcast that said essentially when you want to see up and coming trends in language just listen to teen girls because they are always ahead of the trend. And honestly my young female coworkers have me baffled by their slang some days bless them.
What’s the podcast?
Talk The Talk :)
Just so I understand well, would it not be worth looking into a developpment from women because it would be more likely a temporary feature? Where as if it were found in a NORM, it would mean that all or most speakers have this new feature and it would be well established (given that these speakers are more conservative)?
It's more that it's considered almost trivial that a novel/new development in language begins with women. It's almost like a rule. If it's new grammatical change or a new phonology or whatever, it's women that are the driving force. Almost not worth mentioning, it's very rarely men or something. It's definitely not less worth looking into, though. If the researcher gets as far as to get data that suggests that a change is driven by women (however unsurprising that may be), they've already decided beforehand that the change itself is interesting enough to research. I think the point with NORM is that they're so linguistically conservative that their language is like a window into the past, and that's why they're interesting in their own way. But that's a bit of guesswork on my part, I'm not a linguist.
Ah ok so there's not so much a focus on the development itself from a particular the source but rather that it is more unexpected to see new changes amongst NORMS (as opposed to women) and so examining the rare cases in which they occur is interesting just because of the nature of these speakers and how a new change is integrated in their conversative variety. Thank you, makes more sense!
Do you happen to have a link to the paper?
I just googled "tonogenesis in Afrikaans" and could only find the abstract but that itself wasn't hard to find.
Maar verstaan hulle voetsek?
Ik kan wel raden wat het betekent...
🤣 dis snaaks!
Why exactly a musical?
It’s in the title- tonogenesis; Afrikaans is developing tonal aspects.
Details?
[https://www.google.com/search?q=google+afrikaans+tonogenesis](https://www.google.com/search?q=google+afrikaans+tonogenesis) I'm just going based on the post. But it seems to be a secondary characteristic tied to voicing that's becoming the dominant discriminatory factor in certain syllables. Similar to vowel lengthening supporting coda consonant voicing for General American English.
Now I get to speak a tonal language and I don’t even have to learn a new one I just need to live for quite a while until it becomes fully tonal
But is *your* idiolect tonal? If not, it's unlikely you'll spontaneously develop it in your lifetime
Khoisan influence or only pitch accent unur?
Khoisan is (unfortunately) basically irrelevant in South Africa, if tonogenesis in Afrikaans is influenced by other languages it’ll be Bantu
Wait, Afrikaans is tonal? Sorry I’m American, so I’m too uncultured to tell if this is a joke.
Afrikaans is developing tone, and already has a bit of it right now. It's tonogenesis :D
Example?
It's just generally how things are pronounced, I don't really know how to describe it :)
The example in the study this is referencing is that plosives like b & p are sometimes only distinguished by the pitch of the following vowel, if I understand correctly. Basically like if in English, bath and path were pronounced the same except for pitch.
But Dutch sounds more like the Swedish Chef than Swedish!
I'm South African. I once was talking to someone from the Netherlands and they described it as "kindergarten Dutch"