Summer Research: Paramore in Pakistan

Jonathan Paramore, a second-year PhD student, spent part of the summer carrying out fieldwork in Pakistan. He had the following to report on his return:

“I received a THI Graduate Student Summer Research Fellowship Grant to (1) investigate the acoustic correlates to stress in Mankiyali and (2) help lead an International Training Workshop on Language Documentation at Allama Iqbal Open University in Islamabad, Pakistan.

“I spent almost three weeks in Danna, which is a remote mountaintop village in the Khyber Pakhtunkwa Province of Northern Pakistan. There are about 500 speakers of Mankiyali, and it is unintelligible to any of the surrounding languages. Interestingly, there was no access to the village by road until about 10-15 years ago, so it has remained relatively vigorous until recently. Unfortunately, now that the village has become more connected, the dominant language of the region (Hindko) is slowly taking over. Presently, about 20% of the village cannot speak Mankiyali, and the number is rising. I spent most of my time recording thirty different speakers reading a list of about 100 tokens embedded in carrier sentences. Each speaker was recorded twice. The target tokens are designed to analyze and compare the acoustic correlates of syllables in both stressed and unstressed positions. We are in the process of segmenting and annotating the data. Mankiyali is a specifically interesting case to analyze the acoustic correlates of stress because it has a weight-sensitive stress system with (at least) three levels of weight: CVV > CVC > CV. It is unclear where the syllable types CVVC and CVCC land in the hierarchy, so the experiment analyzes stress with the null hypothesis that the language has a 5-way stress hierarchy: CVVC > CVV > CVCC > CVC > CV. The main two questions being asked are a) what are the acoustic correlates to stress in the language generally and b) do different syllable types utilize different phonetic correlates to communicate the presence of stress?

“I also spent five days in the capital of Pakistan at Allama Iqbal Open University helping to lead a training workshop on language documentation. There were about 40 participants consisting of professors and PhD students from universities around Pakistan who came to participate. We taught the basics of using recording equipment, ethics, archiving data, what to record, etc. Many of the participants are mother-tongue speakers of endangered languages in Pakistan, and they were excited to learn techniques for preserving their languages. The workshop seemed to be a success, and it certainly raised awareness for the importance of language documentation in Pakistan. A couple of advisors to the Prime Minister even made appearances to promote the workshop.”