Palula Phonology Summary

Henrik Liljegren* and Nasim Haider**

Frontier Language Institute, 19F Khushal Khan Khattak Rd., U.T., Peshawar, Pakistan.

*Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.

**Anjuman-e-Taraqqi-e-Palula, Drosh, Chitral District, N-W.F.P., Pakistan.

Palula is spoken by approximately 10,000 people in the southern part of Chitral District in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. It is an Indo-Aryan language, closest related to the variety of Shina spoken in the Indus Valley. The speech described here is the dialect spoken in the Ashret valley in Chitral, one of two major dialects. The transcription is based on the speech of one of the authors (NH), who was born 1978 and grew up in Ashret.

Consonants

	Labial	Dental/ Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	p b	t d	t’ d’	c j	k g
Affricate		ts	ts’
Fricative		s z*	s’ z’**	š	x* ğ*	h
Nasal	m	n	n’
Flap		r	r’
Approximant	w			y
Lateral approximant		l

*Almost exclusively in loanwords.

**Only in a few native words.

The plosives are pronounced at five distinct places of articulation, although the palatal ones often have a clearly discernable affricate pronunciation, and may possibly be described as palato-alveolar, the voiced one often further ”fricativized”, especially intervocalically. A sixth place of articulation, a post-velar or uvular [q], is used by some educated speakers for pronouncing this sound in loan words of mainly Perso-Arabic origin, whereas it normally tends to approximate a velar fricative pronunciation. The fricatives /z, x, ğ/ are rather frequent in present-day Palula, and many of the words probably have a long history in the language, although they almost exclusively derive from languages in the immediate region. A labio-dental [f] is sometimes heard in more recent loans, primarily from Urdu and English, but with many speakers it alternates freely with a voiced aspirated plosive [p^h]. The voiced retroflex fricative is a marginal phoneme, but is included for comparative reasons, and an even more rarely occurring voiced retroflex affricate [dz’] is most likely an allophone of this phoneme. The /w/ is most of the time realized as a labio-dental approximant. There is insufficient proof to regard a velar nasal [ŋ] as a phoneme independent from /n/, as it only occurs before /k/ and /g/, or as a variant pronunciation of [ŋg].

p	píili	‘drank (f.)’	j	jéeli	‘bore (f.)’
b	bíid’i	‘many (f.)’	y	yíir’i	‘sheep’
m	míiša	‘men’	t’	t’aaká	‘call!’
w	wíiway	‘wife’s brother’	d’	d’aaká	‘robbery’
r	reetí	‘nights’	n’	déen’i	‘lower part of leg’
l	léedi	‘found (f.)’	r’	déer’i	‘beard’
t	téeti	‘hot (f.)’	s’	s’éeti	‘quarreled (f.)’
d	déedi	‘father’s mother’	z’	z’amí	‘sister’s husband’
n	néer’i	‘stream bed’	ts’	ts’iinkí	‘having twittered’
s	seetí	’having looked after’	k	katí	‘how many?’
z	zeerí	‘supplication’	g	gad’í	‘having taken out’
ts	tsiipí	‘having squeezed’	x	xatí	‘letters’
š	šéemi	‘spleen’	ğ	ğeerí	‘caves’
c	céeri	‘spouted jug’	h	harí	‘having taken away’

The occurrence of initial /n’/ or /r’/ is questionable or at best marginal (as is also the occurrence of /h/ in any other position than initial). [r’] is sometimes used initially in a shortened form of some of the demonstratives /ar’ó/~/r’o/ ‘that’, /ar’é/~/r’e/ ‘those’.

Vowels

	Front	Back
	Front	Unrounded	Rounded
Close	ii, i		uu, u
Open	ee, e	aa, a	oo, o

Phonologically Palula has a 10-vowel system comprising five basic qualities, each having a long and a short counterpart. The /aa, a/ is phonetically mostly an open central vowel, whereas we here for the sake of feature economy have described it as contrasting with the /oo, o/ in terms of roundedness only. The /ee, e/ are mostly realized as mid-open unrounded front vowels, and the /oo, o/ as mid-open rounded back vowels. Generally, the short vowels /i/, /a/, and /u/ are phonetically less peripheral than their long counterparts. The short /i/ tends to have a more central pronunciation than the long /ii/; the short /u/ on the other hand is both more open and slightly more central than the long /uu/; the short /a/ is also slightly less open than the long /aa/. Environment as well as accent (see below) further influences the exact pronunciation of each of the ten vowels. Neutralization takes place at word margins between short unaccented /a/ and /e/, as well as between short unaccented /u/ and /o/. There are words in Palula with distinctive and non-predictable nasalized vowels, but as they are rather few, we are regarding nasalization as phonemic without postulating a set of nasalized vowels beside the oral ones.

i	gir	‘turn around!’	ii	giír	‘saw’
	t’íki	‘bread’		tíin’i	‘sharp’
e	t’éka	‘peaks’	ee	t’eeká	‘labour’
	prés’	‘mother-in-law’		keén’	‘cave’
a	šak	‘doubt’	aa	šaák	‘wood’
	t’áka	‘blame’		káan’	‘ear’
u	sum	‘dry mud’	uu	súum	‘I will sleep’
	t^húki	‘spittle’		kúun’	‘corner’
o	t’oká	‘hit!’	oo	t’ooká	‘push!’
	tróki	‘weak, worn out’		kóon’	‘arrow’

Aspiration and breathy voicing

Aspiration or breathy voicing is considered a property of the lexeme as a whole, mainly due to its limited word-internal distribution. In words with this feature present, the aspiration is normally assigned to the onset of the initial syllable of the word. This feature occurs only once in a word and is transcribed with [^h]. Some minimal pairs illustrate the contrastiveness of this feature: /b^hóola/ ‘were able to’, /bóola/ ‘hair’; /k^haréer’i/ ‘bolt’, /karéer’i/ ‘leopardess’; /w^híi/ ‘will come down’ (3sg), /wíi/ ‘water’. Most Palula consonant phonemes can be accompanied by this feature, and it is usually phonetically realized with the immediately following vowel being pronounced as breathy, in addition to an h-like release of the consonant itself: /p^héepi/ ‘father’s sister’, /d^hut/ ‘mouth’, /t’^hóngi/ ‘axe’, /c^héeli/ ‘goat’, /j^haát’/ ‘goat’s hair’, /l^hoón’/ ‘salt’, /m^haás/ ‘meat’, /y^hóolo/ ‘he came’.

Stress and accent

Main stress falls on the final or the penultimate syllable of the lexical root, although the latter is only possible if that syllable also has a long vowel. The stressed syllable receives a moraic pitch accent, phonetically realized as high level or falling on a short vowel /á/, rising on a long vowel /aá/ or falling on a long vowel /áa/: /hár/ ‘every’, /haár/ ‘necklace’, /háar/ ‘take away!’; /séeti/ ‘thigh’, /seetí/ ‘having looked after’; /deédi/ ‘burnt (fem.)’, /déedi/ ‘father’s mother’. Although the breathy vowels (as described above) often are accompanied by an intial pitch-dip, the pitch accent and its further implications for morphophonology, is in Palula clearly distinct from the secondary effect aspiration has on pitch; aspiration may coincide with a rising accent as in /d^hoór’/ ‘yesterday’, as well as with a falling as in /d^hóor’/ ‘you may wash’. In the first word the rising pitch is phonetically reinforced by the aspiration, whereas in the second word an initial rising pitch is followed by a falling pitch about half-way through this long vowel, as to produce a phonetic rising-falling contour. Accent has not been indicated here on monosyllabic words with a short vowel.