A brief descriptive grammar of Pijal Media Lengua and an acoustic vowel space analysis of Pijal Media Lengua and Imbabura Quichua

Abstract

This thesis presents an acoustic vowel space analysis of F1 and F2 frequencies from 10 speakers of Pijal Media Lengua (PML) and 10 speakers of Imbabura Quichua (IQ). This thesis also provides a brief grammatical discription of PML with insights into contrasts and similarities between Spanish, Quichua and other documented varieties of Media Lengua (ML). ML is typically described as a mixed language with a Quichua morphosyntactic structure where almost all content words are replaced by their Spanish-derived counterparts through the process of relexification. I use mixed effects models to test for statistical significance between PML Spanish-derived vowels and Quichua-derived vowels. The results provide suggestive data for (1) co-existing vowel systems in moderate contact situations and (2) moderate evidence for co-exsiting vowel systems in extreme contact situations. Results also show that PML may be manipulating as many as eight vowels and IQ as many as six.