In multilingual communities, contact varieties are characterized by a combination of linguistic features from the source languages. Speakers of Asia Minor Greek (AMG) cohabited with Turkish speakers for 800 years until the 1923 Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations which forced a two-way mass migration between Turkey and Greece. This severed AMG speakers’ everyday contact with Turkish. Many second- and third-generation heritage speakers of AMG now live in villages in Greece. In this diachronic study we examine the intonation of the continuation rise tune in the speech of two generations of AMG speakers: first-generation speakers born in the Anatolian peninsula and second-generation speakers born and raised in Greece. We examine whether contact effects in intonation persist after contact has ceased, through comparison of the f0 patterns in the speech of the two AMG generations with those of Athenian Greek and Turkish speakers. Our findings show two patterns in the f0 curve shape and pitch alignment of the continuation rises, one similar to the Athenian and one similar to the Turkish, indicating code-mixing. In addition, our results reveal that this dual patterning diminishes in the speech of second-generation AMG speakers, indicating intergenerational change towards a more Athenian-like pattern.
Cite as: Baltazani, M., Przedlacka, J., Coleman, J. (2020) Intonation of Greek–Turkish contact: a real-time diachronic study. Proc. Speech Prosody 2020, 730-734, doi: 10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-149
@inproceedings{baltazani20_speechprosody,
author={Mary Baltazani and Joanna Przedlacka and John Coleman},
title={{Intonation of Greek–Turkish contact: a real-time diachronic study}},
year=2020,
booktitle={Proc. Speech Prosody 2020},
pages={730--734},
doi={10.21437/SpeechProsody.2020-149}
}