Consonantal Debuccalization and Deletion in Minangkabau

Saleh Saeed Batais

SAGE Open, 2024, vol. 14, issue 2, 21582440241240576

Abstract: While there are many useful studies on Indonesian native phonology and loanword phonology, none has yet explored Minangkabau loanword phonology in depth. Therefore, based on a list of 52 well-established native Indonesian loanwords elicited from 10 adult native speakers of Minangkabau and verified by native speakers and transcribed in IPA, and within the ambit of Optimality Theory, this paper aims to investigate the following research questions: What are the phonotactic repair strategies employed in Minangkabau to adapt these words? Why are they triggered? Are they phonologically or phonetically driven? And why? The study finds that the two observed repairs are consonantal debuccalization and consonantal deletion, which are both employed in order to fulfill the phonotactic conditions of Minangkabau. In Minangkabau, obstruent and liquid consonants are disallowed word-finally; as a result, word-final voiceless stops /p, t, k/ in native Indonesian words are debuccalized into the glottal stop /Ê”/, and the voiceless fricative /s/ into the glottal fricative /h/. However, unlike word-final obstruents, the word-final liquid consonants /r, l/ in native Indonesian words are adapted through deletion when entering Minangkabau. The results, moreover, show that that the above repair strategies are guided by phonology rather than phonetics; that is to say, among others, they are guided by coda restrictions in Minangkabau phonotactics in terms of word-final obstruent and liquid consonants. Finally, by presenting evidence from Minangkabau in favor of the phonological stance, it is believed that the paper contributes to the significant debate as to whether loanword adaptation is phonological or phonetic.

Keywords: debuccalization; deletion; Indonesian; loanword phonology; Minangkabau; Optimality Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/21582440241240576 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:14:y:2024:i:2:p:21582440241240576

DOI: 10.1177/21582440241240576

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().