Re-assessing tonal diversity and geographical convergence in Mainland Southeast Asia

Southeast Asian Tone in Areal Perspective

“…It is here that contact may play a role, albeit an indirect one, in the spread of tone throughout the region. Matisoff (1973Matisoff ( , 2001 has repeatedly emphasized the relationship between monosyllabicity and tone, a correlation that we also found in the statistical study of our database (Brunelle and Kirby 2015;cf. Donohue 2012).…”

“…There could be areal convergence even if some of the language families were tonal before arriving in MSEA. However, in a recent study based on the same database of 186 languages as this chapter, we were unable to establish geographical proximity as a factor of tonal convergence independent of language family and word type (Brunelle and Kirby 2015). In the end, the real question that needs to be addressed is not why MSEA languages are so frequently tonal, but if the number of tonogenetic events in MSEA Austroasiatic and Austronesian in the past two millennia were higher than would have been the case if it had not been for contact.…”

“…To give a different sense of the range of tonal diversity in MSEA, we include here a brief overview of the tonal properties of languages included in the database described in Brunelle and Kirby (2015). At the time of writing this database includes 186 Southeast Asian languages from five families.…”

Language in the Mainland Southeast Asia Area

“…Syllables have an initial-and-rhyme structure. -Preference for one (major) syllable per word, with many languages featuring minor syllables or pre-syllables in an iambic pattern; see Pittayaporn (2015), Butler 2015, Post (2015) and Brunelle and Kirby (2015). -Lexical contrast is marked by laryngeal features including pitch and phonation type, often in combination.…”

“…When asked what this means, most linguists would agree with Yip (2002: 1): 'A language is a "tone language" if the pitch of the word can change the meaning of the word.' But as linguists of MSEA languages since Henderson (1952Henderson ( , 1965Henderson ( , 1967 have insisted, it is wrong to think that pitch is the sole or defining feature of a tone system in MSEA (see Kirby 2015 andSidwell 2015; see also Abramson and L-Thongkum 2009): 'It is important to recognize that pitch is frequently only one of the phonetic components of "tone" as a phonological category . .…”